The Tunstall mystery deepens

The farm at Tunstall circa 1867 with the family and farm buildings outside.

The more I investigate the more questions arise. When my mother and I visited Tunstall 29 years ago, we were shown over a well established timber-framed three-storey farm house which had been updated, probably in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when farming in England was an important part of feeding the nation. Imports were difficult during the Napoleonic Wars. The artist John Constable's father, owner of several mills on the Essex/Suffolk border, prospered in those years. Also one of the heroes of the Napoleonic wars was Admiral Horatio Nelson, a Norfolk man.
    Jane Betsy was born in Tunstall in January 1823, perhaps at the farm or nearby. Her husband, James Pollard Skinner, oldest son, James Charles Skinner, younger son Thomas Skinner and oldest daughter Harriet Louisa are all buried in the churchyard. By 1876 Jane Betsy has moved out to Heigham Road, Norwich. The letters Emma Jane has kept indicate she is not well.
   Was it Tunstall itself which was unhealthy? Did the family move away because the marshes were causing the illnesses which took so many of them? Were the fields fertilised with London muck, as they were on Mersea Island in Essex, when the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould, who lived there in the Rectory from 1871 until 1881, complained so bitterly about the practice. Was that causing a spate of illness in the families who lived there? Was it because mechanisation was coming in and farming was not profitable?
   If the family had been comfortably off at one time, Jane Betsy, her sisters, their children and their cousins' fortunes fell. The reasons are far from clear and must have been a complete mystery to all surviving members of the family at the time, including my great grandmother Emma Jane. It is probably why she kept the letters.
    The families are so large, there are cousins all over Norfolk to trace. Some of them I have traced through their letters.
    In the course of my researches I've found a first cousin five times removed who was a carpenter and millwright. He died the Yarmouth workhouse (1909) Eight years later, his only grandson, a third cousin twice removed, is killed in Flanders (1917).
    Emma Jane's cousin Arthur Skinner emigrated with his family from Yarmouth to New South Wales, Australia.
    One thing I can be sure of, I have many close and distant relatives (DNA verified) through Jane Betsy's Parents. And, of course, I have her sketch book from 1831. Each page is watermarked "J.W. Hatman 1830" One of her sketches is below. The same watermark is mentioned at auction details for artists of the period, including J.M.W. Turner.