Here I’m presenting a piece of research aimed at getting to know Birmingham as it was when Joseph Wilkes was a young man.
Joseph Wilkes was a silversmith, and I wanted to get a better picture of the Birmingham around the time he was a teenager and a young man.
I searched the available business directories for all the Wilkes businesses that advertised around the time, as well as all the silversmiths, and I plotted them on a detailed map from 1819.
Below is the map with each green dot representing one of the silversmith businesses. The light green dots are those who were advertising when Joseph committed the crime that led to his transportation to Australia. Most of them were located in the more developed central and western part of the town. Which one of them might Joseph have worked for?
The orange dots represent the Wilkes businesses. It’s highly unlikely my Joseph had his own business, but perhaps his parents or another of his relatives did.
