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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Tabbicat26 on Thursday 31 October 24 21:36 GMT (UK)
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A gentleman from what is now St. Lawrence's hospital kindly searched the records about the admission, in August 1854, to the County Asylum in Bodmin of Mary Rowe Williams who was the 2nd of the 3 wives of Thomas Davis Oldham.
He noted that Thomas was registered in the Asylum records as "the Borough of Bodmin Tailor". I appreciate that this may just have been to prove that Mary had an appropriate residential qualification to receive care in the Asylum. Please can anyone confirm that this was an official position and, if so, what Thomas' duties would have been. Thank you
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I believe it's just saying her husband lived in the Borough of Bodmin and was a Tailor by trade.
ADDED
Census records list him as a Tailor
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Thank you for replying. It is the inclusion of the word "the" that makes me wonder if it was an official position, I wonder if someone making the registration of a new patient, presumably a regrettably routine duty, would have bothered to include it.
You are right when you say that the censuses record him as a Tailor, so were his father and younger brother. Several of the younger Oldham men married milliners - family photographs are spectacular!!
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I can see a few newspaper ads for "Borough Tailors". What can it mean?
See for instance:
https://www.findmypast.co.uk/image-share/140f5a30-6b0d-437d-b03f-3baa2a30f747
https://www.findmypast.co.uk/image-share/21fea508-9386-4e4f-910e-2c19032ef96e
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Hello Shaun and thank you for your interest in my greatx2 grandfather's brother. I've followed your two links to Find my Past, it's interesting that the two tailors mentioned are both in the "Northern Parts". You imply that you have seen other other occurrences of the phrase "Borough Tailor", were they also from a long way away from Cornwall? I ask because there is no sign of the Oldham family in Cornwall before Charles Oldham (Thomas' father) married Prudence Davies in December 1789. Several official documents suggest that Charles was born c 1765 and an elderly member of my extended family believed that he was born in Oldham. If that is true then possibly it was Charles who introduced the phrase into Cornwall.
About a year ago a cousin acquired, at auction a brass nameplate bearing the name
OLDHAM TAILOR. Expert opinion is that the nameplate dates from the 1820's but the auctioneer had no idea where it had been since then. We then discovered that the name plate had been sold a couple of years previously, with the auction catalogue stating that it had been the property of John Oldham of Padstow. That is incorrect as John (Thomas' younger brother) settled in Portreath following his marriage to Mary Ann Box in 1821 and didn't return to Padstow until the 1840's. We suspect that the nameplate belonged to Thomas, about whom we know very little.
I am at a loss to know where to look next, I wonder if trade directories might give a clue.
Apologies for being slow to respond but I didn't get an e/mail telling me of your post, for which renewed thanks!
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the opc database has a transcription from a directory dated 1852-3. Thomas is one of 9 tailors mentioned in Bodmin.
https://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/search-database/more-info/?t=miscellaneous_records_index&id=37785
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Thank you for your response. I note the spelling Boar Street, I have only seen it written in other places as Bore Street.