William Welch and Jane Freeman are the parents of Martha Welch.
Evidence for the Family
On 24 May 1779, William Welch of Winchfield married Jane Freeman at Odiham, Hampshire. Later that same year, and over the next two decades, a series of children were baptised at St Mary, Elvetham, a small neighbouring parish: Elizabeth (1779), William (1781), Jane (1784), Martha (1786), Sarah (1788) and George (1790), and probably John (1797), Catharine (1799) and James (1802), all recorded simply as sons or daughters of William (or Wm) Welch. The Elvetham register does not name the children’s mother, but the close fit in time (beginning immediately after the 1779 marriage), in place (Winchfield–Odiham–Elvetham), and in age with the burial at Elvetham on 28 January 1828 of William Welch of Elvetham, aged 74, strongly suggests that these are the children of William Welch and his wife Jane (Freeman).
Targeted searches of Hampshire parish registers, civil registration indexes and the 1841 census for a female Welch/Welsh connected with the Elvetham–Winchfield–Hartley Wintney–Odiham area have not revealed any convincing alternative candidate for William’s wife; any Jane Welch/Welsh entries that do appear belong to other places (Portsmouth, Yarmouth, Sherfield upon Loddon, Goodworth Clatford, West Meon) or to later nineteenth‑century individuals. In the absence of evidence for another wife for William Welch of Elvetham, this reconstruction treats Jane Freeman as the probable mother of the Elvetham Welch children, while recognising that this identification is inferential, since the baptism entries themselves name only the father.
With the focus of this OPS being on the Bracknell family, William and Jane do not feature significantly in this study.