There is an area in central Devon on the western edge of Dartmoor that can potentially take our family back to 1700. There the parish of Thrushelton touches onto Marystowe, Germansweek and Bratton Clovelly and lies on one of the oldest pack-horse trails between Cornwall and Devon that follows the ridge between Launceston and Okehampton, that today is largely mirrored by the nearby A30. The area lies midway between these two towns affording in the past a high-level resting place for traders and travellers. In 1989 much of the River Wolf valley that flows through Germansweek was flooded to create Roadford Reservoir which now laps on a shore only metres away from the bottom of that village.
Around 1780 William White was born probably in Germansweek and in the early 1800s he married Mary, whose parentage is currently unknown. They had at least three children but Maria came along in 1809 and in 1831 she married Richard Medland in Bratton Clovelly.
Medland is very much a south-west name, very prevalent across much of Devon and Cornwall in the 1700s, and perhaps surprisingly given the distance in time, we have DNA links that take us to the Medland families of Thrushelton back then. There in 1749 John Medland had married Elizabeth Gloine and over the next 14 years they raised their family of four sons after two daughters died in infancy. They were almost certainly agricultural in terms of trade in a very agricultural area. Of these children George and Richard it seems remained in Thrushelton, and Robert disappears from the records. It was William who moved to nearby Germansweek whose name arises from the Church dedicated to St Germans and “wic” meaning village or hamlet. There he married Jenny Down in 1795 and over twenty years they had 3 sons and 4 daughters, one of which – Mary Medland – describes her father William as a ‘farmer’ on the certificate of her second wedding to John Gerry, a Cordwainer from Marystowe.
It was William Medland and Jenny’s (nee Down) second son Richard who was born in Thrushelton in 1800 and who went on to marry Maria White in Bratton Clovelly in 1831. They raised their children in Eworthy and Germansweek and gradually the eldest children either died or were put out into service – George shows as a servant aged 12 in the 1851 census. Eventually by 1871 Richard became a labourer at the Copper mine at Whitchurch on the edge of Tavistock where a number of his sons were also employed.
Of their nine children, Mary was the eldest surviving child and in line with tradition at the time, was baptised back in Thrushelton in 1835. She is still living at home in the 1851 census. She is currently unfound in the 1861 returns but what we do know is that by 1867 she had arrived in Aston in Birmingham where she became the second wife of Thomas Musto, a Malster in one of the local breweries. There Mary began raising her family of 4 children in the back-to-backs in Lozells. Thomas died in 1907. Her only son David fought in the First World War with the Royal Worcester Regiment but survived the fighting, while her daughter Mary Jane went on to marry into the Birmingham Jewellery Trade.
Mary Musto (nee Medland) died in Birmingham twenty years after her husband, in 1927.
But Came They All to Birmingham 