Audlem is a small but ancient Parish and Market Town in the middle of the Cheshire Plain and on the border of Cheshire and Staffordshire, seven miles south of Nantwich and a similar distance north of Market Drayton. The village is centred around the Anglican Church of St James founded in the 1200s and Audlem’s market Charter was granted by Edward I in 1296 from when local pottery kilns have been excavated. Moss Hall dates from 1616 and the Old Grammar School from 1650. The Butter Market was refurbished in 1733. As the 1800s progressed the staple products of oats, potatoes and hay gave way to livestock and dairy produce.
There were also tradesmen milling, rope-making, bootmaking, blacksmiths and wheelwrights, shops and public houses but by the mid-1800s it also included places of worship for Baptists and for both Weslyan and Primitive Methodists. The arrival of the Shropshire Union Canal in 1835 was significant for Audlem, facilitating the transport of both agricultural goods and coal. The flight of 15 locks through the village was designed by Thomas Telford. Audlem railway station opened in 1863 on the Wellington to Nantwich line but it closed 100 years later.
The Parish includes the smaller village of Buerton two miles up the hill to the east on the road towards Woore. Buerton Old Windmill dated 1779 stands on Windmill Lane. The area is predominantly rural and agricultural with cheese being a major local product. The timber framed Highfields House dates from 1615 and Woodhouse Farmhouse from around 1700 as do Smithy House, Dairy House and today’s Buerton House which was originally Tythe Barn Farm.
It was in Audlem that Joseph Hall and Elizabeth raised their family from 1787. A marriage has not yet been identified and we do not know their origins nor their parentage but the births of may well have got married in Audlem as there are a number of Hall families recording the births of their children in the church records at the time. There are 20 marriages involving the surname Hall recorded in the Audlem registers between 1775 and 1795.
From July 1787 through to August 1804 there are 6 christenings of children born to Joseph and Elizabeth Hall in Audlem, three sons and three daughters, the youngest of whom was Catherine who census returns say was born in Buerton. Nineteen years later in August 1823 it was in the same church that she married Nelson Whiston.
Meanwhile, in 1760 in Acton just outside Nantwich Mary Wilkinson was baptised, daughter of Hugh Wilkinson and Anne. In 1771 in Nantwich Hugh had been apprenticed to Thomas Walley to learn the trade of a Cooper. Mary however was in Audlem when she married Thomas Whiston in 1793.
Whiston is a slightly unusual surname that occurs around the Country, occasionally in Scotland but in England it is found to its greatest extent across Cheshire and Staffordshire where there are even two villages called Whiston. It is probable that the Whiston family had lived around Audlem for a number of generations back to before 1700. Thomas and Mary had four sons over the next nine years – Thomas in 1794, James in 1796, John in 1800, and Nelson in 1802. All were baptised in Audlem.
We have a good number of DNA links that take us to Nelson Whiston. Nelson was presumably named after the English naval hero Admiral Nelson after the Battle of the Nile, as this was still some 3 years before his death at Trafalgar in 1805. His mother died 2 months after he was baptised, so the family were brought up by their step-mother Ann (nee Prince) whom their father married 15 months later and with whom at least two more children subsequently arrived to join them.
In 1823 Nelson married Catherine Hall, a local girl from Buerton, the daughter of Joseph Hall and Elizabeth Nelson and Catherine had four sons and four daughters over the next 18 years. Their fourth child, Mary, was baptised in the Weslyan Chapel but I have not found that to be the case with the others. Nelson was initially recorded in 1841 as a farm labourer but by 1851 he had joined his brother Thomas as a Brick-Maker in Buerton, a profession that was later carried on by his son James after he moved to Lancashire. Their son William became a schoolmaster, and Jacob a coal miner at Cannock near Walsall, although Jacob and his family emigrated to Ohio in the Mid 1880s. Nelson pre-deceased his elder brother Thomas when he died in 1861, and Catherine died the following year.
It was their daughter Mary who, in 1852 in Stoke on Trent, married George Crutchley, a wheelwright from nearby Woore, but within 3 years they were living in Moseley Street, Deritend in central Birmingham where George was now a Wheelmaker at one of the local railway Coachworks. In the next 22 years they had ten children.
Mary Crutchley (nee Whiston) died in Saltley, Birmingham in 1902 aged 79.
But Came They All to Birmingham 