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Lizzie, this is looking very good.  I've just looked at Roseanna and Charles' photocopied marriage certificate and you are right - it's not Thomas who was a witness, it was Edward, well a contraction of Edward.
Edward and Mary Ann were uncle and aunt.
Do Edward and Mary Ann show up in any other censuses I wonder?  Must check.
Thanks for clearing up that little mystery.

I know he had one son (at least) called John.  Unfortunately there were dozens of John Ralphs living around Toll End, Nock Street, Lower Gornley in the mid-1800s.
I can't identify the particular John I want other than he turns up on various children's marriage certificates as a Boatman.  As Thomas lived in Nock Street, just round the corner from Toll End I'm guessing he was a boatman or canal worker of some kind, not a tinner or a miner.  His granddaughter, Emma (for whom there are no records on FreeReg despite me having a paper copy of her marriage) married Thomas Wright who was another boatman like his father.
Most Ralphs in that area of Tipton were boatpeople.  I wish I could find Thomas on an earlier census - 1841 or 1851 but not luck as yet.

Hi Jaywit
Checked out FreeReg and found Thomas Ralph, widower marrying Lettice Bate but can't find any further details on that site. Put in loads of 'trials', things I have answers to, but I just kept getting zero results.  I couldn't even find myself!

Thanks Suz, census would be great.  Interesting that Maria was pre-marriage, I didn't know that.

I have found it difficult tracing people through censuses because sometimes they just don't appear for years then you might find just the one, once!

Many thanks again.
Mary Jane

Hi NDRFT

You have to remember that at the time of the 1861 census Thomas was 80 years old and possibly not working.

My thoughts were that as a young man in the late 1700s he left Oxfordshire to seek work on the canals and later met his wife, Catherine (although she is 10 years younger and may have been his second wife).  She was born in Tipton.

What surprises me is that he doesn't appear on the 1851 census at all.

His son John (at least we assume he had a son called John), John's son William, John's grandson and great grandson were all boatmen until the great grandson became a Drayman.

It would be so much easier if the Georgians and Victorians used random or unusual names, but since several branches of the family all used the same names with the odd different one thrown in occasionally, it makes tracking them down so difficult.

Perhaps Thomas, like William and Thomas, his grandsons, was born whilst travelling and his 'home' was Tipton, but somehow I don't feel this is right - were people living on barges in 1781?
Mary Jane