William Budgen – my 7th great-uncle.
William Budgen was baptised in St Margaret’s Church in West Hoathly on 25 September 1707, the son of Thomas Budgen and Sarah Comber. He married Elizabeth Farmer in the village on 1 June 1736 and was buried in West Hoathly on 30 April 1782.
He’d obviously been reasonably successful in life as he left a will dated February 1780 in which he was described as a yeoman and bequeathed a significant amount of property. His eldest son William and his daughter Anne, wife of George Holman, both received two shillings and six pence.
His son-in-law, John Young of West Hoathly, a hoop-maker who married his daughter Elizabeth, received the same amount. He left his son Thomas his freehold messuage and appurtenances – in effect his home and grounds – in West Hoathly. Thomas also received “that piece or parcel of freehold land containing by estimation one acre and a quarter more or less, adjoining to the lands of Sir Joseph Peake … and to the King’s Highway leading from Turners Hill to Horsted Green … now in my own occupation and which I purchased off my brother Richard Budgen and is situated lying and being in the parish of West Hoathly…”. Finally, William’s son Thomas received all of his father’s other goods, clothes and stock.
Budgen family historian John Howes has written, in the Sussex Family Historian magazine, that William was likely to have been the first of the Budgen hoop-makers – a trade continued on by generations of his descendants well into the 20th century.
Sources: All data has been gathered from the Sussex Family Historian magazine, Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.com and the National Archives.