Were these two Yorkshiremen brothers?

QMy 5x great grandfather Joseph Hutchinson was born in Yorkshire in c1780-1783, but I’m struggling to find a suitable baptism record for him.

Joseph was a colliery blacksmith in the village of Methley, where there was also another blacksmith at the same time named Thomas Hutchinson. Thomas was the son of Christopher and Isabella Hutchinson, who lived in the nearby village of Middleton.

Interestingly, Joseph had a son named Christopher ( my 4x great grandfather) and a daughter named Isabella. But the coincidences don’t stop there: when Christopher married my 4x great grandmother Abigail Thompson in 1836, he did so in Whitkirk, where Thomas Hutchinson had previously lived with his wife Maria Ward.

Furthermore, when Christopher and Abigail had my 3x great grandfather in Methley in 1838, they decided to name him Thomas.

Although I haven’t found a definite record to prove it, do you think that Joseph was the son of Christopher and Isabella Hutchinson, and therefore also the brother of Thomas? Nick Monaghan

AThe fact that Joseph and his wife named their two children Christopher and Isabella is a good indication that these were his parents’ names and he was passing them on to the next generation.

A search for the baptism of a Thomas Hutchinson born between 1780-1790 finds one in the parish of Rothwell, Holy Trinity ( before Middleton became a parish in its own right), on 18 January 1789 with parents Christopher and Isabella.

Three other children were baptised in that parish with the same parents’ names: Isabell (1787), Elizabeth (1782) and George (1784). No trace was found of Joseph. Records from the parishes of Rothwell and Methley are included in datasets on both

ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk. It is always a possibility that Joseph was baptised in a separate parish or a nearby nonconformist chapel, although no records were found during my initial search.

I would concentrate on trying to find marriage records for all four of Christopher and Isabella’s confirmed children to see who the witnesses were. For example, when Thomas married Maria Ward in 1810 in Methley, one of the witnesses was his brother, George. If Thomas and Maria had a family, they may have named their children after their parents and siblings too.

Finally, as Thomas and Joseph were both blacksmiths, was the (elder) Christopher a blacksmith too? The baptism records for each of his children don’t list his occupation, but there could be other material in the area indicating that they followed their father in his occupation. It may be worth searching archives in the West Riding area to see if there are any apprenticeship papers. Carol Kerry- Green