I can trace my family back with certainty and paper records to just 1822 when David Woodhead was born in Meltham, Yorkshire- not too far from the town of Woodhead.  I am pretty sure that Thomas Woodhead and Rachel Mallinson were David's parents- based on the date of their marriage, the name of their children, and the fact that David Woodhead named his firstborn son Thomas.  

     I know that Margaret Dobson, who married David Woodhead, had a sister who married Charles Dickens' brother Alfred.  David and Margaret then named their second son Charles Alfred and the story is that Charles Dickens was his godfather.

     Margaret Dobson was married before to a Robert Jackson and had a son by him.  I think her husband died and she left her young son with her parents when she married David Woodhead and moved from Glascow, Scotland to York.  

     David Woodhead was originally a schoolteacher.  How he met a widow from Glascow and married her in Scotland is a big mystery.  He was a school teacher in York, too and he and Margaret lived near Alfred Dickens family in York.  At some point David Woodhead became a railroad clerk and moved to Hull, Yorkshire.  He continued working as a railroad clerk for the rest of his life.  After his wife died he remarried and years later died in a lunatic asylum.  His sons- Thomas Dobson and Charles Alfred both worked in a shipping business.  Thomas was the company owner and Charles is always listed as clerk at the company.  The business seemed to do well and owned several ships.  In the 1900s the T.D. Woodhead Shipping Company merged with Cockerline Shipping and no longer seemed to be in the family hands.

     Charles Alfred took his family and left England in 1892 and settled in the Baltimore/New York area.  Presumably he "cashed in" his share of the business to start over in America.  A newspaper article documents him having a "disastrous financial reversal" in the late 1890s and he moved his family to Washington D.C. right at the turn of the century.  Here they were involved with the social clubs and didn't seem poor, but in 1916 when Charles Alfred killed himself he was listed as running a deli- and he lived in a room upstairs.