Sarah Porter (b.1791) was described on her wedding record as being from Longborough, Gloucestershire, just north of Stow on the Wold when she married James White in nearby Broadwell in February 1814.
James had been born in 1793 in Broadwell, a small village just off the Fosse Way. He was one of six children (3 boys, 3 girls) born to James White and Ann (nee Ellis) who had married in Stow in 1779, although Ann and all six children were baptised on the same day in Broadwell in 1805. Chances are, in that part of the country, they all worked in agriculture (labourers on the 1841 and 51 Census returns) and in 1861 census age around 70 James is shown as an ox-man.
Their second son, James married Sarah Porter and had eight children, 4 boys and 4 girls. The first two were born in Longborough and the next 6 in Lower Guiting (today, Guiting Power)a few miles to the south-west. In later census returns, sons John, William and Thomas were labourers while the youngest son Giles went on to become an agricultural engine driver in nearby Hawling. Meanwhile daughter Mary White (b1821) met and presumably married John Davis around 1841.
Back in 1770 the Davis family were in Gotherington, a few miles north of Cheltenham and south of Tewkesbury. It is a small village largely overshadowed first by Cleve Hill, the highest point in the Cotswolds, and secondly by the nearby Bishops Cleeve, a much larger settlement. This is also where the nearest Anglican Church St Michael’s and All Angels is located, and in which many of the family christenings, marriages and burials occurred. Gotherington has been a largely agricultural village based around farms for hundreds of years although in the later 1800s this developed into a greater emphasis on Market Gardening.
In 1802 William Davis married Ann Mansell of another Gotherington family in the church at Bishops Cleeve. Over the next 15 years they had seven or eight children, but it is only the youngest two, John (baptised in Bishops Cleeve in 1813) and Thomas (baptised 1817) who are known to have lived to a sufficient age to marry and raise children of their own. William’s date of death is also unknown and he has not been found in the 1841 Census, while Ann (nee Mansell) died 8 months after the birth of Thomas in 1817. It seems likely that the Davis’s followed outdoor trades, those of cattlemen, oxmen, waggoners and carters, which perhaps explains their absences from many registers and census returns. Thomas married and went to live in Coberley just to the South of Cheltenham working most of his life with farm animals.
No record of the marriage of Mary White and John Davis has yet surfaced, possibly because initially John was also possibly a Waggoner travelling the country – a tale told by the birth places of their first children before settling down in Bishops Cleeve. We have DNA links to a number of their eight children (of which we are aware) born between 1842 and 1858. Their first-born, Emma, was born in Gorton near Manchester. The others all appear to have been born in Gloucestershire and the majority were baptised in Bishops Cleeve. Apart from Thomas (born 1850) who it appears emigrated to St Louis in Missouri, USA in the 1870s, they all married and stayed local to the Cheltenham area. The eldest, Emma Davis went on to marry Charles Hickerton in 1866, a Coachman and Groom from Cheltenham. Sometime in the mid 1880s the family moved to Saltley in Birmingham with their eight surviving children where Charles continued to be referred to as a Coachman or Groom for the next 25 years.
Both Emma Hickerton (nee Davis) and her husband died in Birmingham in the early part of 1919, perhaps from the Flu epidemic that followed the Great War.England following the cessation of the Great War?
But Came They All to Birmingham 