Person:James Edwards (95)

James Edwards' origins are unknown. His first confirmed sighting is on 17th September 1787, when he was married at North Mundham in Sussex to a Susannah Bollard. At the time of his marriage he was not living at North Mundham, but over fifty miles away at Eastbourne.

Immediately after their marriage, James and Susannah settled at Pagham, the neighbouring parish to North Mundham. Their first daughter was baptised there just two months after their marriage. In all they had ten children baptised at Pagham between 1787 and 1807.

This was the period of the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. The threat of a possible invasion from France was much feared in Britain, and low-lying coastal Pagham with its beaches and natural harbour would have felt particularly vulnerable. There was a baptism of an Owen Edwards at Pagham in 1801, whose father Edward was described as being from the Caernarfonshire Militia, indicating greater military presence in the area. Owen's baptism is the only other Edwards family record in Pagham around this time, and it may purely be a coincidence.

James and Susannah's son Henry would later give his birthplace as Lagness, a hamlet in Pagham parish on the road linking Pagham with the nearby city of Chichester. Of James and Susannah's ten children two died as babies.

James has yet to be traced after the baptism of his youngest child in 1807. His daughter Mary was married later that year and his first grandchild was born the following year. Susannah died in 1832, aged 65. Her burial also gives her residence as Lagness.

Given the proximity to the sea it is possible that James may have died at sea and so no burial was recorded - no evidence has yet been found for what his occupation was, although all his sons appear to have been agricultural labourers, suggesting a land-based occupation rather than a sea-based one. It is worth noting that there was a 75 year old William Edwards who died at Runcton in 1840, where James's son Henry lived at the time, but who was buried at Pagham, where Susannah had been buried. No earlier sighting of this William has been found, so the possibility remains that a mistake was made for his name on his death certificate.