The Humfrey name appears constantly in the Blewbury Parish Records.  Mentions begin in the early seventeenth century.  A branch had developed in the chapelry at Upton.  The Humfrey family winds in and out of the Lousleys, the Bohams, and the Caudwells before, during and after the period of the Slade letters.  Charlotte’s younger sister, Martha Lousley (1795-1858), married Joseph Humfrey (1795-1842) in 1823.  They had a number of children, bearing noticeable handles, viz., Simeon, Phoebe, Zacchaeus, Grace, and Mercy.  Two of their sons attended the same school in Reading as Ben Slade, their cousin.  We see them going back to school by train, no doubt a great adventure for the boys (and the father as well).  Unfortunately, Joseph did not last that long, succumbing to a disease of the liver in 1842, aged only forty-seven.  As we have seen, the other part of the Humfrey family, that of Edward, had interlinked with Bohams, Caudwells and also Lousleys.

Doubtless, this constant series of connections will have had implications for property.  It may well have had other implications.  Quite a few of these people seemed to die relatively early, even if they survived infancy.  Joseph Humfrey went at forty-seven, Gad Lousley at twenty-seven, William Boham the Elder died at forty, his son William Blay Boham at twenty-four.  He had been to Friday market, called in at Thorpe Farm for the evening, but somehow caught cold.  Within twenty-four hours he had caught rheumatic gout and lasted a week.  Edward Humfrey the Elder only got as far as fifty-two, before good living, a bad bank balance, and a weak heart got the better of him.  Even Charlotte and her sister Mary Anne died in their fifties.

We should note two other facts about the Humfrey family.  The first allows us to peep behind this magnificent façade of landed people, constantly increasing their position within society, every last one of them doubtless respectable.  It concerns the death of poor Elizabeth Pope of Upton and comes from her burial notice in the Parish Records.  We learn that she went into the ground on October 15^th, 1773.  The same entry goes on to read: miserably whipt by T. Humfrey, Jr and died.  We may wonder at what Elizabeth must have done to deserve this treatment.  Thomas the Whipper may well have been the father of Joseph Humfrey, husband of Martha Lousley, sire of children all carrying good Biblical names, dead from liver disease at the early age of forty-seven.  In 1773, Thomas Humfrey would have been an eager seventeen years of age.  His father, also called Thomas, would not die until 1788, so it fits for this Thomas, the Whipper, to carry the label of ‘junior’. The Humfreys may have made a common place of arrogance.  We hear of Charlotte’s cousin, one William Humfrey of Boxford.  He unpleasantly jeers at the scale of the Swan River operations.  Charlotte takes him down several pegs by correcting his under-estimate, severely low, fortunately.  The second fact about the Humfrey family concerns the Fullers, for we know that a Martha Humfrey married John Fuller in 1753.  Although we cannot identify this John Fuller precisely, we know about his descendants, for the full name of Mrs Elizabeth Fuller was, of course, Mrs Elizabeth Humfrey Fuller.  As we will see, the Fullers of Aston prosecuted intermarriage with a directness that puts even the Lousley-Caudwell-Boham-Humfrey nexus into the shade.