On this page I have set down the information I have collected from research back to the 17th century along some lines in my family tree, This is a sketchy view necessarily as I have relied mainly on the IGI and Sussex Marriage index and due to the distance in time there are fewer recorded documents to check details nevertheless I am fairly confident that the lines can be traced back this far - even if in some cases there are only names and dates.

Going back in the Lock family line to Thomas Lock and Elizabeth Short who married on 10 July 1782. Elizabeth Short was baptised on 7 March 1762, Her parents were George Short and Sarah Widget.

George Short, baptised on 23 April 1737, was the son of Thomas Short and Mary Woodall. George married Sarah Widget on 26 September 1760 having obtained an Archdeaconry of Chichester Marriage licence on 24 September 1760 At the time of his marriage George was a bachelor, aged 22 years and living in Littlehampton, his trade was a cordwainer.

Sarah Widget was the daughter of John Widget ( alehouse keeper) and Sarah Hornsby who had married on 12 November 1736. Sarah was born c 1740 - she was aged 19 at the time of her marriage to George Short and needed the consent of her father to marry.

Thomas Short - George's father - was a tailor by profession from Littlehampton when he married Mary Woodall on 25 April 1729, having obtained a marriage licence from the Archdeaconry of Chichester two days before. 

Mary Woodall - George's mother - was the daughter of Edward Woodall and Mary Browne and was born c.1710. 

Edward Woodall jr. - Mary's father - christened on 11 November 1683,  was the son of Edward Woodall and Elizabeth Brown who married on 25 July 1671. He was a sailor when he married Mary Browne - and both were resident in Littlehampton.

Edward Woodall senior was a mariner from Stepney, Middlesex when he married Elizabeth Brown from Hampton Parva. He had been born in 1644 and christened on 13 November 1645 at St Dunstan's, Stepney. His parents were George Woodall and Elizabeth who had three other sons: Henry christened on 21 December 1638; Walter christened on 8 November 1640 and George jr. who was christened on 14 April 1644 and died 2 weeks later on 28 April. All baptisms were at St Dunstan's.

Stepney and the Plague Years

St Dunstan's church, where the Woodall family had their children baptised, is one of the oldest churches in East London and dates back to the 10th century. It became witness to the terrible ravages of the Plague which swept London in recurrent waves in the 14th century and again in the 17th century. It was this latter wave of destruction that may well have led  the young Edward Woodall to flee the insanitary conditions of Stepney for the cleaner shores of West Sussex where he was to marry  Elizabeth Brown and start a line that has led through to the Lock ancestors and myself on my mother's side of the family.

In 1636, 900 persons died of plague in Stepney and, in 1640, a further 1100. This is the very period in which George and Elizabeth Woodall were struggling to raise their young family. It is hard today to imagine the horror of this fatal illness which few people survived once contracted. Although there were quack remedies, no real treatment was available and once anyone in a household was known to have become infected, the house would be barricaded up and guarded allowing no exit for all inside. Food and water would be passed to those inside but usually only dead bodies would ever come out from the house to be carted away for mass burial in great pits dug at intervals around the outskirts of the area.

The plague of 1664-5 was worse even than previous attacks and it is of this which Daniel Defoe wrote in his Journal of the Plague Year. At the end of September 1665, over 1,000 people died in one week in Stepney and Whitechapel. When St Dunstan's graveyard could take no more, a pit was dug to take the bodies at the corner of what is now Mile End Road and Cambridge Heath Road . Over a thousand corpses were deposited in one pit in Stepney. 

A widow Cooper of Shadwell is believed to be the last person to have died of the plague in December 1665.

I do not know at this time how many of the Woodall family survived the terrible plague years in Stepney other than young Edward, the mariner who moved to Sussex. Clearly the family - or at least some of them -  had come through the earlier plague in the 1640's. It is now believed that a virus rather than rat fleas was the cause of the plague and it is possible that some people may have carried an immunity which protected them from infection. Other plague areas from those times have recorded individuals and families who have lived through devastating outbreaks unscathed which may give some support to this theory.