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I hope nobody will mind if I breathe some new life into this thread after all this time.

I wonder whether anyone else has been experimenting with the Compare-a-Face service (possibly an upgrade from its status in 2018 when the last post on this thread was made) and what sort of percentage matches you are finding for self, parent-child, grandparent-child and sibling relationships.

My experiments so far seem to show that it can usually match a picture of the same person with 90-100%, perhaps a little less if one of the photos is fuzzy or the face is very small.

Parent-child seems to be in the 60s and 70s and grandparent-child can be somewhere between 30s and 60s, quite variable.

I've also seen that it can sometimes find matches of around 30 or 40-odd between people who are unrelated, as far as I'm aware.

One of the main reasons I'm interested in this is that some months back, I bought a photo from eBay that was taken by a photographer who lived a few doors away from my great-great-grandfather Edward Yardley's home. I was struck by the resemblance between the young man and my grandfather, (also Edward) but I wondered whether it was wishful thinking - I don't have a photo of Edward Sr, who died aged only 31.

I ran the unknown photo through the Compare-a-Face service and found similarities of 67% and 75% similarity to a photo of my great-grandfather William, Edward Sr's son.

I'm wondering now how likely it may be that these similarities may have been thrown up by chance, and how much (if anything!), I can read into this.

(The attached photos show the unknown photo on the left.)

He always described himself as a farmer (sometimes with some additional information about how many acres or how many men he employed) so I think the patented machine would have been, at most, a sideline.

The machine he patented was a piece of agricultural machinery which he invented while he was still unmarried and working on his father's farm. Presumably he must have hit on an idea to make the work more efficient.

It's possible that he sold the patent to someone else and used the money from it to set himself up on his own farm. He first applied for the patent in 1896, filed the full specification in 1897, got married in the same year, but was still living at his new wife's house the following year when their daughter was born. By 1901 he had moved with his family to a farm of his own which he appears to have owned. So this might be consistent with him having sold the patent and used the money to buy the farm, rather than going into business producing the invention himself.

The patent appears on Espacenet, which is the Europe-wide database of patents accessible from the British Library, but there's no information about what happened to it after 1897.

I did have a look at the Register of Proprietors as suggested by an earlier poster but could only find information about registered designs rather than patents.

Thank you very much everyone.

I've looked into this in more detail and found a couple of later censuses that definitely give the house number in addition to the schedule number used by the enumerator.

I've also found the house numbers in Kelly's directories from 1888 and 1896.

These have both led me to the conclusion that, at least during the period from around 1881 to 1911, the house numbers stayed the same (some were divided into e.g. 7a and 7b at various points) and the family did move around between three adjacent properties. Two of these were the halves of a semi-detached building which had shops on the ground floor of at least one and possibly both halves. The other property was on the opposite side of a yard which was, at one time, named after the familiy. What I haven't been able to find out for certain, yet, is whether the family owned the properties - the information I've got hold of from the Land Registry so far doesn't give any information dating that far back - but it seems to be quite likely that they did.

In the town in question, Rugeley, they definitely seemed to number in the more common system of odds on one side and evens on the other, at least in all the records I've come across where there is any information about numbering.

I haven't found the relevant electoral registers yet (probably in the county archive, which is currently undergoing refurbishment) but they might also shed some light on who lived where when.

Thank you Andy J2022, that's very interesting indeed.

It sounds as if, given the expense of applying for a patent, it was only something that you would consider doing if you thought you would make some money out of it rather than thinking "I've had a clever idea so I'd better patent it just on the off-chance". This does suggest that filing the patent would have been part of some kind of definite business plan rather than something speculative.

The family in question was not poor - my relative, Edwin Phillips, describes himself as "gentleman" in the patent application, which suggests they had some money to spare - but I don't imagine that they'd want to throw money at something without any obvious money-making potential in it. According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, £30 in 1896 would be equivalent to £2700 today. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

Edwin was still living with his parents and was only around 26 at the time he filed the patent application, then got married the following year to a widow 10 years his senior (my 2xgreat grandmother). I have no idea whether these two events were connected in any way.

I've looked (but not exhaustively) in local papers and trade publications for any evidence of the invention being sold under Edwin's own name. I think there's probably some more mileage in this, particularly if he decided to sell it under something other than his name. As I'm sure you can imagine, more generlal searching for anything to do with "Phillips" in a manufacturing and engineering field just turns up references to the big engineering conglomerate.

Anyway, it sounds as if the next step is to look for the Register of Proprietors and see if I can find anything there - thanks very much for mentioning this!