In May 1771, Henry Dodd married Elizabeth Perrin in Woburn near Bedford. They had four known children, three sons, Stephen in 1772 who was a Postmaster in the 1841 census and by 1851 was a printer and bookbinder, William in 1774 and Joseph in 1776 who was a Stay-worker in the Woburn Workhouse in 1841. But in-between, in 1775 they had a daughter Fanny. In 1797 in Woburn she married a local lad John Stevens who worked in the building trade as a Plasterer. Between them they had eight children, four boys and four girls and we have a DNA link back to this family. John however was to die aged probably around 60 falling from a scaffolding in nearby Maulden but Fanny went on to live another 14 years.
It was their third daughter Elizabeth Stevens who married John Ingram we guess around 1830. No record has yet surfaced of this event unless it was in St Martin’s in Leicester on 25 January 1830 but other than potentially a coincidence in their names we have not found a connection here. Elizabeth and John went on to have nine children all born in Stoke Prior near Bromsgrove, although one died of Typhus aged nine. But how and where Elizabeth from Woburn came to meet and marry John from Bromsgrove has yet to be explained. All of Elizabeth’s siblings appear to have stayed in Woburn.
It was the Ingrams who provided the Bromsgrove connection. Ingram is a very common name around the Warwickshire/Worcestershire border back in the 1700s when there were certainly Ingram families around Bentley and Tardebigge. Around 1770 Richard Ingram was likely born in one of these villages and on 6 October 1796, in St Bartholomew’s Church in Tardebigge, he married Joanna Houghton born in 1774 in nearby Feckenham, the fourth child born to Andrew Houghton and Sarah (nee Dale) who had married there 14 years earlier. Both Richard and Joanna appear to have died before they were 55, Joanna in 1816 perhaps from childbirth complications but maybe from consumption, smallpox or Cholera all of which were fatal at the time. She was buried in Lower Bentley. Richard we think died around 1825 but we have not found the record.
To the marriage of Richard and Joanna we have found two surviving sons both of whom would have been young and still at home for the death of their Mother. There may well have been other siblings – Mary when she married for the second time in 1845 states that Her father was a farmer in Stoke Prior. But of the boys, Henry was baptised in 1812 in Tardebigge. However there are no records yet for John who seems to have been born around 1804 . The records are confusing in that the 1861 census states that John was born in 1809 in Tardebigge, but ten years later the census says he was born in 1804 in nearby Bentley. At his death in 1872 the registers claim he was 72.
In 1841 both John and Henry lived within doors of each other in Stoke Prior, and both were working at the British Alkala Soapworks. John was a Soap-Maker, Henry was an Accountant and both had six children. Henry died in 1850 and a year later his widow Mary was living at Sharpway Gate and her four eldest boys aged 8-15 all are shown as working at the Alkali Works.
The 1851 Census shows Elizabeth is still in Stoke Works but John is not reported as being present that day. By 1861 John and Elizabeth are again at Stoke Works but John had become a farmer employing two men although their son Joseph is still described as a Soap Maker. By 1871 John and Elizabeth were the Landlords at The Navigation Public House by the canal at Stoke Works. He died a year later but Elizabeth Ingram (nee Stevens) lived for another 10 years.
Their eldest son John, born in 1831, carried on two family traditions, firstly in being a soap-maker and secondly in marrying a girl from a distance away with no current explanation as to how they may have met. In 1855 in All Saint’s Church in Hereford he married by Licence Eliza Hardman, the daughter of a Herefordshire Council Accountant and who was a school teacher first in Ludlow and then in Hereford. The couple raised their family however in Stoke Prior where they had the first 4 of their 5 children. For 25 years the Ingram family had been soap/candle makers at the British Alkali Co in Stoke Prior near Bromsgrove, but by 1851 this company was in dire financial trouble. Still in Stoke Prior in 1861, before 1863 the younger John Ingram, his wife Eliza (nee Hardman) and their 4 children had moved to Long Street, Deritend, Aston where their 5th and last child Annie Kate was born in December that year. John Ingram continued to be a Soap/candle Maker, probably at the newly opened Kynoch’s Lion Works (later ICI Metals and then IMI) before moving round the corner to Adderley Road. In August and September 1883, Annie and Alice, two of the daughters of John and Eliza Ingram married George and Rowland Crutchley, two of the sons of George and Mary Crutchley, carriage makers in Saltley.
Over the next 13 years George and Annie-Kate had 5 children whilst living in Havelock Road in Saltley but by 1901 Annie had been placed in the Kings Norton Mental Asylum. It seems that she came out for a while but was readmitted in January 1906. Annie Kate Crutchley (nee Ingram) died in the Asylum in January 1907 aged only 44. There are no records yet found that show a reason for her incarceration or for her death. Her husband George lived on looking after not only his own family, but helping out with his many grandchildren as well, until he died in 1938.
But Came They All to Birmingham 