Now Elizabeth’s grandfather Thomas got himself into a little bit of trouble as one of his customers complained he had short-weighted the loaf of bread.
I found out about his trouble by doing a search on Access to Archives which is a great resource. It is a combined catalogue of a number of archives. Unfortunately it is no longer being supported but it does contain entries from around 450 archives around England, including some quite unusual ones.
Some of the entries are very detailed while others will just tell you that the archives has a bundle of papers covering a date range dealing with a parish etc.
So I found this entry:
With this information I was able to access the file while on a trip to London. The images were taken with my digital camera at the London Metropolitan Archives (after paying a small fee)
This is 1799 and Thomas was fined 36 pounds which seems a huge sum of money. As you can imagine Thomas was fairly unhappy about this and he appealed the conviction.
And the following court session the conviction was quashed. The interesting thing was it did not give any evidence as to why the conviction should be quashed.
I looked further through the indexed court sessions and did not find another complaint against Thomas.
Thomas continues working as a baker until his death December 1840 in Enfield. He was buried December 8 1840 in the St Andrews Enfield churchyard.