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always happen. They lost their mother when they were
only two years old and although George remarried in the same year, his
wife, Dorothy Johnson, died in the next. A third wife, Mary Hatcher,
succeeded in surviving him; he himself died in 1676, within a week after
Thomas II’s wife, Mary.
By his first wife, Thomas II had two sons of the name of
Thomas, of whom the first must have died in infancy. Between the two was
born, in 1645, Nicholas (‘Nicholas I’), who in 1676, a few weeks after
his stepmother’s death, married Sarah Driver of Ash. If Thomas II was
the Thomas Middleton who was buried in 1694, Nicholas I would have been
head of the family until his own death in 1703; at that time the registers
were going through a more informative phase and he was described as ‘Yeoman’.
However, another Thomas Middleton was buried in 1704 and a Thomas
Middleton senior in 1718, either of whom could have been Thomas II. The
second of these was presumably the father of Thomas Middleton junior,
yeoman, who himself was the father of the second recorded Middleton twins;
they, both boys, |
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were born in 1706, but only survived long enough to be christened. A son,
Thomas, was amongst later arrivals.
The headship of the Middleton family, at least so far as Ash
was concerned, seems to have passed eventually to Nicholas I’s younger
son, Nicholas (‘Nicholas II’), who was born in 1692 and in 1720
married Mary Gladish of Ash. In his time a kinsman in Ash, James
Middleton, became, in 1757, the father of the third set of Middleton
twins. They were christened Moses and Aaron, but only Moses survived.
Mary, Nicholas II’s wife, who was left a widow in 1764,
went on to achieve what was for those days the great age of eighty-three;
otherwise, the family honours passed to their son John (‘John I’).
John I had then lately married and, like most of his predecessors, had
found his bride, Anne Deane, from within the parish. Whether or not from
the spread of turnpike roads, Middleton courtships thereafter became a
little more mobile. John I’s only son, likewise called John (‘John II’),
married Jane Hubbard of Mereworth and the husbands of the three of his
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