Joseph s/o Joseph Armstrong & Mary Aspindale christened in Dalston Green Sept 16, 1781.
He left Dalston, any connection he had to the cotton mills, and journied 20 miles south. In the summer of 1808 he married Ann Lowrie, a 17 year old carpenter’s daughter. They lived in her home village of Tallantire, sitting on an eminence from which, on a clear day, you look north to the Solway Firth, a great part of Scotland and the Isle of Man. The area’s major town, Cockermouth, sprawled out 3½ miles to the southeast. Around 1813, Joseph and Ann moved down to Bridekirk. Their reasons may have been economical, for this was the center of the parish.
By the birth of their first child, Joseph was listed as a “nailer”. Like most of the men employed in this trade, he He probably bought iron rods from the nailmaster’s warehouse, and then turned them into nails with the help of a forge attached to his house. He could have employed his wife and children as helpers.
"Typically nailers either rented or owned their own shop but a nailer who had no shop of his own could rent a "standing" from a fellow nailer and share the fire to carry on making nails. Nailers would also have to provide their own tools and equipment ... The best forges are little brick shops of about 15 feet by 12 feet in which seven or eight individuals constantly work together with no ventilation except the door and two slits, a loop-hole in the wall. The majority of these workplaces are very much smaller and filthy dirty and on looking in upon one of them when the fire is not lighted presents the appearance of a dilapidated coal-hole. In the dirty den there are commonly at work, a man and his wife and daughter, with a boy or girl hired by the year. Sometimes the wife carries on the forge with the aid of the children. The filthiness of the ground, the half-ragged, half-naked, unwashed persons at work, and the hot smoke, ashes, water and clouds of dust are really dreadful". - Nail making in Bromsgrove | History of Bromsgrove Nail Making
CHILDREN