Hello Christina & Dolores
Elizabeth Clarke (d. 18 Feb. 1819 aged 27 or 28) was the first wife of tailor and woollen draper Daniel Gobbett of Halesworth. Their tombstone (among the Halesworth churchyard inscriptions printed in the 1890s) also commemorates Elizabeth’s parents: William Clarke (d. 14 Jan. 1842 aged 89; “many Years a Builder in this Town”) and Mary (d. 11 June 1829 aged 77). Elizabeth, daughter of William Clarke and Mary White, was baptized at Halesworth on 7 Aug. 1791 (IGI:
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp?P...).
Daniel Gobbett died on 25 Aug. 1839 at the age of “58”. He was almost certainly baptized at Eye, Suffolk, on 23 July 1780, apparently the eldest of at least six children of baker Daniel Gobbett (c.1751?-1823) and Eleanor Gissing (c.1751-1830) of Eye who were married there on 7 Sept. 1779. If the baker had in fact been a few years younger than his wife, and if his parents were not at Eye (I have not searched the parish registers for them) it is possible that they were shoemaker Daniel Gobbett and Mary Edwards (m. Denton, Norfolk, 1745) who lived in the Norfolk border parish of Redenhall with Harleston and Wortwell. Their son Daniel was born in 1755.
Henry Gooderham Gobbett (1816-1892) was indeed one of the children of Daniel and Elizabeth. His brother William Clarke Gobbett (1818-1890) and two elder sisters, Elizabeth (1814-1856) and Louisa (1815-1901?), were baptized in Halesworth’s Congregationalist chapel (IGI). Henry was a tailor of Halesworth when he married Maria Fairhead (1822-1910; daughter of dealer and farmer Robert Fairhead and Phoebe Lay) at Mutford, Suffolk, on 24 Dec. 1845. In February of that year, also at Mutford, Maria’s sister Anne (1820-1919) had married James Pain, who left her widowed by 1854, when she married Henry’s brother William (a draper of Bristol) in the same church. Sisters Elizabeth and Louisa were assisting William with his Bristol linen drapery business in 1851. Elizabeth Gobbett later moved to Brampton, Suffolk, and was buried at Halesworth. Louisa married (Bristol district, 1853) a grocer, John Jenkins of Aberdare, Glamorgan, who died before the 1881 census. I believe she spent her final days in Cardiff, having lived twice as long as her sister.
If there is no trace of Henry’s middle name among his maternal ancestors, it may go back as far as Godfrey Gooderham (c.1736-1812) who married Elizabeth Gobbett in 1756 at Redenhall with Harleston and Wortwell. Elizabeth (c.1725-1788) was a daughter of Daniel and Susan Gobbet. If (another if!) Daniel and Susan had a son named Daniel in the 1720s (an unconfirmed hypothesis!) he could have been the shoemaker who married Mary Edwards at Denton in 1745, perhaps making Godfrey Gooderham an uncle of Henry Gooderham Gobbett’s grandfather. Another child of Daniel and Mary was Mary Gobbett, baptized at Redenhall with Harleston and Wortwell in 1749. She seems likely to have been the Mary Gobbett who married Robert Edwards in that parish in 1778, when Godfrey Gooderham was the first witness to sign the register. For more information about him, you may like to obtain a copy of his will. I have not seen it but I think this is the Norfolk Record Office's reference: Gooderham, Godfrey. Cathedral Precinct. 1810-1824. O.W. 1790-1823. No. 87.
I’d be very interested to learn more about Henry’s son William Clarke Gobbett (1851-1934?) and his family. Please feel free to contact me by e-mail.
David Gobbitt