Born 15 AUG 1717
Description (Blindness) ABT 1723
Totally blind from about the age of six after smallpox (put to school at four, two years there, then "seized with the small-pox, which rendered him totally blind"). Because his parents had other children to provide for, he was taught music at thirteen.
Residence 1739
After marrying, "took a small house at Knaresborough"; soon after bought an old house and rebuilt it himself, raising the stone from the river. Knaresborough remained the family home until Dorothy's illness in the 1770s.
Born ABT 1742
Baptised 23 APR 1742
Baptised at Knaresborough. Second child — the memoir: "On the birth of a daughter (the second child) Mrs. Benson herself was godmother, and presented Metcalf with fifty guineas."
Born ABT 1744
Baptised 18 JUL 1744
Baptised at Knaresborough. Ellen and her husband Thomas Ingleson kept her father's house at Spofforth from his retirement in 1792 until his death in 1810.
Military service 1745
Jacobite rising of 1745: assistant to the recruiting sergeant raising Captain Thornton's Knaresborough volunteers, then accompanied the army to Scotland (Falkirk, Culloden), employed moving guns over boggy ground; home to his family in spring 1746. The gravestone alludes to it: "when rebellion reared her giant size, 'twas his to burn with patriot enterprise".
Born ABT 1746
Baptised 20 MAR 1746
Baptised at Knaresborough; youngest of the four.