Emma Hill was the third daughter of eight children born to John Hill and Sarah (nee Pearmain). Their marriage took place in February 1819 some miles away in Aston and the Pearmain maiden name is confirmed in the Baptist Ebenezer Chapel records for the 6th child Samuel. All of the children including Samuel are also recorded in the records of the main St Phillip’s Church. John was a Button Burnisher.
After marriage the family lived in central Birmingham, first in Bread Street (this name changed to Cornwall Street around 1900 and runs downhill between Newhall Street and Livery Street) and then a hundred yards further away in Fleet Street running alongside Farmers Bridge Locks on the canal, before moving to Lench Street by St Chad’s RC Cathedral. Over the next twenty two years they had seven children in the back-to-backs of Hockley, five girls followed by two boys. Samuel followed the family line and became a Button Burnisher, but James was deaf and dumb. He became a Glass Cutter living initially with his eldest sister Mary Ann who had married a Fruiterer but later elsewhere as a lodger. Sarah married a Builder and Beer Retailer, Eliza we think died unmarried in 1853 and Emma married Joseph Grigg, another Button Burnisher in St Martins in 1845
The name Grigg (sometimes Gregg) is another name that was already found in the area between Birmingham and Wolverhampton during the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the 1770s and before. We have DNA connections back to Samuel Grigg born around 1757, and his wife Hannah (probably nee Chambers) who married in St Peter’s Harborne in 1780 and there are potentially others further back for another 100 years. Samuel and Hannah potentially had around ten children, but only three of the boys are known to have survived to sufficient age to appear in the 1841 Census. Of these Samuel was a Publican on Soho Hill just half a mile North of Birmingham City Centre, and William was a Labourer living in Harborne. The third son, Joseph had a twin sister Mary who died when she was five. Joseph was a Button Burnisher who lived in Hospital Street when in 1825 he married Ann Evans, born in Birmingham (around 1801) and went on to live in Gt Russell Street.
In the mid 1750s it is estimated that 8000 people in Birmingham, men, women and children, were employed in the Buckle Trade, but then buckles began to be replaced by buttons. John Taylor gilded metal button from his premises in Crooked Lane in dale End, and then in Union Street, making a fortune that allowed him to participate in the formation of Lloyds Bank. Matthew Boulton developed the trade to include all sorts of plated goods, silver and jewellery, eventually from his Soho Manufactory on Hockley Brook. Between 1770 and 1800 twenty-one patents were granted across England for improvements in the fastening of clothes, and nineteen of these were in Birmingham. It is said that one button would pass through fifty pairs of hands before it was complete with each operation being so simple that it could be managed by the youngest of children. The final stage was the ‘burnishing’ or polishing. The quality end of the market was in the making of pearl buttons where the whole process was undertaken by single highly skilled craftsmen.
The 1841 Census finds Joseph living with his wife Ann in Hospital Street just north of the city centre with eight of their eventual nine children. At this date their son Joseph born in 1824 is already described as a Button Burnisher aged only 16. The next son, George was to become a Pearl Button Maker, and Robert became a Japanner (covering items with a black lacquer) before he moved to Glasgow, then on to Newcastle and then Bristol. Ann (nee Evans) died in 1847, possibly in childbirth, while Joseph died in 1855 aged only 61.
It was their son Joseph who married Emma Hill in St Martin’s Church in 1845. They went on to have nine children over the next 18 years.
Emma Grigg (nee Hill) died in 1889 aged 64 and Joseph the year after aged 66 but by then all three surviving sons – Joseph, Samuel and Edwin – were in the Button trade and most of the surviving girls also married either into Buttons or into the local Jewellery trade. It was Emma, born in 1849 who in 1870 married George Clark, a bricklayer recently moved into Birmingham from Windsor, but while at least one son followed his father into bricklaying, almost half of their 11 children took advantage of the excellent Jewellery School in Birmingham to follow the Birmingham Jewellery Trade. Emma Clark (nee Grigg) died in Unett Street Birmingham in 1904, aged 55, outlived by her husband by four years.
But Came They All to Birmingham 