If my theory is correct and Abraham and Ann Roberts moved from the West Country to London in the early 1790s, presumably with their young children Lazarus and Elizabeth, then their next child was another boy, born on 4 February 1794 according to the baptism records for St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey: ‘Abraham, son of Abraham and Ann Roberts, Ropemaker, East Lane’. It was unusual for the second son to take the father’s name: in this branch of the Roberts family this would traditionally be the first-born son. But if we have the right couple, perhaps there was an earlier boy also named Abraham, born before Lazarus, who died in infancy? Abraham and Ann were married in 1787: there was time for them to have had a child before Lazarus was born in 1790.

It is not certain if the Abraham born in 1794 survived for long though: he is not obvious in any nineteenth-century census, nor any record after that of his baptism. An Abraham Roberts was buried on 19 November 1794 at St Mary Magdalene church – but the one in Woolwich, not Bermondsey where our boy was baptised. The parish record is flagged by a symbol which could well indicate that it was the burial of an infant (if it is him, he was only nine months old).

So, was Abraham, the son (if this is him), buried at Woolwich because his family had temporarily relocated here in 1794? Or was it that there were no burial spaces available locally and so the infant was taken downstream for burial there? Either way it could be him.