He is not recorded as a student at either Oxford or Cambridge and there are no obvious forebears who could have fitted William's reference to his great grandfather being 'either the younger brother or the younger son of the baronet of our name', so that part of the story remains unexplained. My grandfather being a dissenter, however, objected to godfathers but named my father (Thomas Sydney) after him.' Thomas Williams makes several references, in his letters, to Capt. Some information about Thomas Williams's life can be gleaned from the inscriptions on his tombstone at St. Mary's Church, Alverstoke which, 爆草 along with the appropriate entries in the sexton's register of burials, have been recorded and filed at the Portsmouth City Records Office. Allowing for the reform of the calendar in 1752, dying in the 'forty sixth year of his life', his birth date could have been between 1st July 1724 and 29th June 1725. Thus, there is just a possibility that Thomas, the son of William Williams of Chancefield, noted above, born on 28th June 1725, might be the same person.

His grandfather, the Rev. Thomas, died thirty years before William was born and William was only three when his own father died. All of Thomas and Mary's first six children were christened at the Gosport Chapel and all by the Rev. David Bogue. We cannot be absolutely certain from this research that we have identified 'our' Thomas but it is probably as near as we are going to get in all the circumstances. We are not going so well but expect to see land tomorrow or Monday. Thursday 25th Got up at 8 am but was nearly beat going for breakfast being wet and windy. This pleasant village, where country houses were being built for the merchants and citizens of London, was set in a strongly dissenting neighbourhood. He was one of the Directors of the old undenominational Missionary Society of London, the parent Society of the present London Missionary Society and the C.M.S. In 1768 the King's Head Society bought a copyhold mansion in High Street, Homerton, in East London, as a permanent site for its academy. Their high seriousness was in marked contrast to the intellectual blight which had descended upon the universities. Higher education in England was then the monopoly of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, constrained by a curriculum derived from the scholastic treatment of medieval philosophy.

The universities' chief function was to provide a classical training for the clergy of the Established Church in England. The Congregational Fund Board demanded a degree of classical learning before its students entered a four year "academical" course of training for the ministry. By this time he was 27 years old and had already been the minister at Gosport for two years, after six years training for the ministry at Plasterer's Hall, the Congregationalist Academy, and shortly after he had been elected a member of the influential King's Head Society. The King's Head Society offered a course lasting six years, the first two of which the students spent as "grammarians", acquiring a classical education. Hi there the Scratch cards went really well they were very easy to sell course of the price you had to pay (eg.50cents.$1.$2.$3) so i would recommend it to anyone doing a Fundraising Event. They began to attract laymen as well as intending ministers, among whom may be found politicians like Harley and Bolingbroke, and writers like Defoe.

He kept an autobiographical diary which covered his entire life, from his birth in 1752 until a few days before his death in 1828. He began writing this diary in 1765, when he was only twelve, and the passages relating to his earlier life are based on memory. Jim had an excellent memory for stories he had been told about this, particularly those that he considered had been passed down to him by the family 'elders', that is, those of previous generations, many of whom he claimed to know personally, and from whom he was privileged to be the guardian of knowledge for their successors. It's okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. The younger Thomas staunchly maintained his own Congregationalist faith throughout his life, as did his sister, Rebecca Voke, in Gosport. Both Thomas and Mary were members of the Castle Gate Independent Chapel in Nottingham, though after Mary's move to Southwell, her faith seems to have evolved into low church Evangelical Anglicanism, probably under the influence of her nephew and son-in-law Edward Garrard Marsh.