We have a DNA link back to the marriage of our 3x great grandparents Sarah Reeves and Joseph Carter in St Bartholemew’s Church Edgbaston in May 1808. Further back than this is currently guesswork and coincidence.
Sarah Reeves could be the Sarah baptised in St Phillip’s Birmingham in 1786 to William Reeves and Sarah. If so, she could be a daughter born to the William Reeves and Sarah Hands who married in St Martin’s in 1792. If this is so, they could also be the parents of Thomas Reeves baptised in St Martin’s in 1795, and there are also a William Reeves and Sarah who had daughters Maria (1791) and Ann (1793) baptised in St John’s Deritend.
Similarly there are two Joseph Carters found being baptised in St Martin’s Birmingham in 1787, one in September to John and Mary Carter, and one in December to Joseph and Esther Carter. In July 1840 there is a death of a Joseph Carter from Lionel Street recorded at nearby St Paul’s Church in the Jewellery Quarter stating that at death he was 52 so could have been one of these two.
What we do know is that on 30th May 1808, in St Bartholomew’s Church, Edgbaston, Birmingham, Joseph Carter, a Gilt Toy-Maker, married Sarah Reeves. Acceptance of the 1786 baptism of Sarah to William and Sarah Reeves would mean that she was twenty or twenty-one years old when she signed the marriage register register with a cross in 1808. Which is not impossible.
Over the next eleven years Joseph and Sarah (nee Reeves) had seven children initially in Livery Street and then in Cock Street, but 5 appear to have died young leaving only the youngest, Emma who lived to the ripe old age of 73, our 2x great grandmother, and her elder brother Samuel Reeves Carter, who died aged 32 in 1844. Despite his short life Samuel married Caroline Ashford in 1831 and between them they had five children, and through these we have DNA links to ancestors alive today.
The Census of 1841 finds Sarah (nee Reeves) a Widow and Washerwoman aged 54 living with her newly married daughter Emma in Regent Place in the Jewellery Quarter, then with her first husband William Boote, a Copper Plate Printer. Emma and William had married the previous September, three months after the death of Emma’s father Joseph in June. On the certificate her father is stated to have been an Office Clerk. However it seems that William Boote died in 1845 without them producing any family, and by 1850 Emma was living with John Cork, a Steel Toy Maker from Wolverhampton whose first wife had died in 1847 leaving him with a surviving daughter Lavinia. The family have not been found on the 1851 Census but the birth certificate of their first child, Emma born in 1850 shows John and Emma (nee Carter) as the parents, living in Great King Street. They do however appear in the 1861 census in the back-to-backs in Irving Street, where in addition to Lavinia, they now have 5 further children of their own. It appears that John Cork and Emma Carter did not formally marry until July 1872, only six years before John died aged 61.
Emma Cork (nee Carter) lived for a further 14 years, finally passing away in 1892.
But Came They All to Birmingham 