Researchgate

"Thomas Tunaley, Merchant of Milan".

Background to Thomas's name change and his potential link to Sir Thomas Lombe

P.P.Burdett's 1769 sketch of Full Street, Derby where Thomas Tunaley and family lived. Also Erasmus Darwin and family

Ann Tunaley (see panel on right) and her offspring's close relationship with the London area may be significant just as John Hezekiah Tunaley's marriage (1777) was at Hanover Square, London.

One theory is that Thomas arrived in Derby from the London area having previously worked as a trader for either The Levant Company or the East India Company - click here.

Links to Derby would then have been via London trading with the Old Silk Mill.

According to the book "Recollections of Francis Boott: for his grandson F.B.D." Thomas Tunaley came from Italy and was born Thomas "Tunalli" (click here).

Original records more recently discovered by the author offer a more detailed insight into how the Tunaley name came about around the time of the John Lombe mill construction, completed 1721. Click here for the latest information.

Thomas Tunaley

(Master Feltmaker)

Records, dated July 1755 from the Kew Archives, show that Thomas Tunaley's occupation was Master Feltmaker in Derby with a female apprentice named Sarah Chandler.

Thomas m. Katherine (Catharina) date and place unknown.

Thomas d. 1755. Buried 24th October 1755.

Following Thomas's death, Katherine married again, 18th October 1757

to Burder Taylor, after which she was named on the baptism records

of the three children that followed as "Catharina" (click here for

the full details).

N.B. "Catarina" is the correct Italian version of the name Katherine.

Kew Archives: July, 1755, apprenticeship record: Thomas given as Feltmaker in Derby with a female apprentice, Sarah Chandler.

Given the circumstances that prevailed, Thomas may also have produced hats for the gentry. In an era of fashion icons such as Mme.de Pompadour and later Marie Antoinette, superior felt hats would have been embellished with hand-applied silk embroidery. In Thomas 's case, silk may have been purchaed as "noils" (silk waste) from the closeby Old Derby Silk Mill with the female apprentice, Sarah Chandler, operating as seamstress. Moreover, we know that Thomas's son, also Thomas Tunaley, is shown on his marriage certificate as a silk throwster and that in a document of 1780 "Hall and Tunaley" is listed as a silk throwing business. It is also likely that the younger Thomas served his appenticeship at the Old Silk Mill, where silk waste would have been available in abundance.

Go to Hall and Tunaley Silk Throwsters) for when the Tunaleys moved into dyeing and The Early Tunaleys, Feltmaker and Throwster