In or around 1771 one of our 4x great grandparents, Elizabeth Cartwright, was born likely in Birmingham, but we are unsure of her parentage further back. Cartwright is very much a common Birmingham name at the time, evinced by there being two Elizabeth Cartwrights registered as being baptised to different sets of parents in August and October 1771 at St Martin’s in the centre of town and another in 1774. What we can say is that in October 1795 in the same church registers we find her marriage to Samuel Heath. Similarly, Samuel arises from an as yet unidentified family. It is possible that the Heath family were Cordwainers, makers of leather shoes, as opposed to a Cobbler who only repaired them.
There are four children identified as born to this marriage, all baptised at St Martin’s – Mary (1799), Elizabeth (1801), Thomas (1803) and Sarah (1806), but it was Elizabeth Heath who went on to marry Edward Bray, a Tallow Chandler from a Shropshire family, at St Phillip’s in Birmingham in 1826.
Edward’s parents were Francis Bray and Margaret (nee Tasker). The Bray and Tasker families were all living around the Clee Hills in 1770, in and around Abdon, Clee St Margaret and Stoke St Millborough, halfway between Much Wenlock and Ludlow, with Bray families further back from Castlemorton near Malvern and the Shelley family from Eccleshall.
The Shropshire Hills sit in the Welsh Marches, an imprecisely defined area in the south-west of Shropshire located between the mid-Wales border and the Cheshire Plain, lying west of the River Severn and north of Herefordshire. The area includes Long Mynd, the Clee Hills where Brown Clee, the Stiperstones and Titterstone Clee all reach to above 1750ft (530m), with a shoulder reaching north-west to The Wrekin outside Telford.
Abdon is a remote rural hamlet sitting on the slopes of Brown Clee Hill overlooking Corve Dale which separates it from the southern side of Wenlock Edge. Called Abetune in the Domesday Book (1086) the settlement itself then comprised only 9 households, and in the next 700 years the population hardly changed. Approaching 1800 there were maybe only 30 households across the extensive rural parish. The River Corve flows south-west towards Ludlow where it joins the River Teme. From there it then flows South and East across to Tenbury Wells before joining the Severn south of Worcester. Nearby are the villages of Clee St Margaret and Stoke St Milborough, and an Iron-Age hill fort at Nordy Bank. The hamlet lies some 10-12 miles distant from each of Ludlow to the south-west, Bridgnorth basically east, Much Wenlock to the north and Church Stretton to the north-west across the River Corve at Beambridge (the bridge was built in 1811 and is today a listed structure).
Goings-on in the World did not affect the citizens of Abdon much, who were far more interested in the weather and the seasons and in generally keeping alive. But in the mid 1800s events across the Atlantic Ocean in America were about to change things for at least one family in Abdon (and probably many more around). Mormon Apostles crossed the Atlantic at the end of the 1830s and started preaching across the country, drawing large crowds and baptising many converts in local rivers.
In Abdon in 1792 Francis Bray married Margaret Tasker. Both appear to come from families who had spent generations in the area and they appear to have been well educated because a good number of the family could largely both read and write. Diary entries written later by their Mormon grandson Thomas suggests that Francis or Margaret were from the family of a Surgeon, and in the generation prior to that there was a Rector or Clergyman. Whatever Francis Bray died in 1830 and by 1841 Margaret (nee Tasker) was a widow (she died a year later in 1842) living with her married daughter Phoebe and her husband William Hall who were farmers in Monkhampton. In their 38 years of married life Francis Bray and Margaret (nee Tasker) had had 7 surviving children between 1790 and 1806 – 3 sons and 4 daughters. It was their middle child Elizabeth for whom life was to take an unexpected turn when in March 1818 in Neenton she married James Boyer Shelley. The couple were converted to Mormonism by one of the speakers sent across from America in those years, possibly by Brigham Young himself.
They sailed for Utah from Liverpool to New Orleans, but Elizabeth drowned when she fell overboard as she attempted to draw water from the Mississippi. Her husband James Boyer Shelley and their family continued on where James became a founding member of the religion at American Fork in Utah.
Of the other children of Francis Bray and Margaret (nee Tasker), Thomas became a Wheelwright at Acton Burnell before moving to Shrewsbury as a Carpenter where he was joined in the trade by his brother James. Thomas married Martha Ann, Phoebe married the farmer in Monkhampton, Martha married a Wheelwright in Neenton, Sarah a farm labourer at Ditton Priors. But the eldest son Edward sometime after 1815 moved to Saltley in Birmingham and became a Grocer and Tallow Chandler – traders in oils and the making and selling of candles – where he met and married Elizabeth Heath.
By 1841 Edward and Elizabeth were living in New Canal Street in Birmingham Town Centre with their three children Tallow Chandler at work
Sarah, Mary and Edward where by 1851 they had been joined by a Thomas’s daughter Emma (their niece) visiting from Shropshire, and who was later to marry Edward.
Sarah interestingly was christened in 1828 as Sarah Reighnolds Bray. To date we have not found a Reighnolds in the family tree, but back in Shropshire on 21 April 1790 in Tugford, just next door to Abdon, a Sarah Bray married an Edward Reighnolds, an owner of some land in the area. There are then the deaths of two Edward Reighnolds in Tugford, one in 1796, and one aged 46 in 1801. Perhaps her middle name was given to her in remembrance of a tragic story that accompanies these dates, or there is a relationship yet to be discovered.
In 1849 Sarah Reighnolds Bray married Samuel Barnes, a Coachbuilder from the family that moved into Birmingham from Burntwood near Lichfield. With Samuel she had five children by 1860, and then another two ten years later, although one, a daughter Sarah, died young. Their eldest son Edward worked for the railways, while the younger two, William and Arthur learned the printing trade. Their daughters Clara married Jack Bradbury, an Ivory Button Toolmaker, and Lizzie married Howard Cork, a Maker of Steel Toys.
Sarah Barnes (nee Bray) died in Legge Street, Birmingham in 1882 where her husband survived her for another 18 years.
But Came They All to Birmingham 