So let me introduce our families and where they were in or around 1770. This involves potentially 128 different surnames covering the two families, representing our 4x great grandparents. Here they are organised here through the families of Sue’s mother Rita and father John, and through my mother Edith and father Alan. For want of a better structure I have grouped these families into eight sections each including sixteen people for each of the parents of Rita, John, Edith and Alan.
Details of the journey that brought them to Birmingham are available in these next Sections but here we identify where they were in and around the 1770s. From where did they start their journey?
Their story begins with real people who existed at a time when George III was on the throne, when Pitt (the Elder) was Prime Minister, and when civil revolution was afoot in both America and France. These people were alive in England when Abraham Darby provided the iron for the world’s first single-span iron bridge and when the Industrial revolution was in its infancy, when Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, when tolls collected at Turnpikes began to improve roads, when 160 miles of canals were built in Birmingham alone linking its businesses to the coast at London, Bristol, Liverpool and Hull. They were there when increased mechanisation was occurring in all ways of life challenging the feudal agricultural norm of society, and when the population started moving from the countryside into towns in search of regular income. These ancestors of ours made their choices and earned their living while the Lunar Society was meeting in Coffee Houses across Birmingham, when Matthew Boulton was building his Manufactory, and when James Watt was inventing the condenser for steam engines. They were spectators as the Black Country began earning this unflattering nickname and while the population of Birmingham began to increase rapidly from 40,000 to 80,000, to 200,000, and to the millions that live here today.
For some their journey into Birmingham was still some distance away into the future, but some were already there.
Devon, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.
4.1a) Mary & William White, Jenny Down, William Medland.
The White family were specifically around Germansweek and Eworthy, on the northwestern edge of Dartmoor in Devon. The Down and Medland families were in Thrushelton some 6 miles south of there. This is farming country on the edge of high moorland, and members of both families who remained show as farmers or agricultural labourers in the later censuses.
4.1b) Elizabeth Louch, John Smith, Mary & William Musto.
The Louch and Smith families were then to be found in Cumnor – then in Berkshire but today in Gloucestershire, geographically only a few miles west of Oxford. They likely worked for the Bertie family, the Lords of Abingdon as general labourers. The Musto family were settled in Burford some 20 miles or so to the west towards Cheltenham where William Musto was a blacksmith.
4.1c) Sarah Porter, James White, Ann Mansell, William Davis.
The Porter and White families were in and around Winchcombe and Temple Guiting and in Broadwell near Stow-on-the-Wold. The fact that their children were born across the country suggests perhaps that they were waggoners and carters. The Mansell and Davis families were long-term residents of Gotherington near Bishops Cleeve between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury where they were likely cattlemen, ostlers or oxmen, but also maybe waggoners and carters.
4.1d) Sarah Pinnel, George Greenman, Mary Marsh, Thomas Hickerton.
The Pinnells and the Greemans were in the villages of Hullavington and Stanton St Quintin in northern Wiltshire halfway between Chippenham and Malmesbury and just north of what is now junction 17 on the M4 motorway. The Hickertons appear to have arrived there from Box further into Wiltshire having married into the Marsh family from Salisbury. They too were agricultural labourers, but also quarrymen for the local cornbrash limestone.
Black Country, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Surrey.
4.2a) Sarah & Joseph Steventon, Sarah Deakin, Samuel Disturnal.
Around 1770 are the births probably in Willenhall of Joseph and Sarah Steventon, possibly in the metal trade somewhere between Wolverhampton and Walsall. They raised their children in Oldbury. Their daughter Sarah married Samuel Disturnal in Yardley in 1771 where Samuel was the village blacksmith. The Disturnals (originally D’Estournelle) had fled from France 70 years before during the Huguenot massacres.
4.2b) Elizabeth Davis, James Poulson, Sarah & John Lane.
In the 1770s the Davis and Poulson families were to be found in Bisley, Gloucestershire between Stroud and Cirencester. In later years the census shows them as labourers. Meanwhile Staverton between Gloucester and Cheltenham is where John Lane was born in 1770 but further details of his family or of his wife Sarah remain to be discovered perhaps because his family were widespread in the carting trade.
4.2c) Sarah Pearmain, John Hill, Ann Evans, Joseph Grigg.
On later Census returns the families of Pearmain and Hill gave every indication of having been living somewhere between Smethwick and Birmingham for many years back into the late 1700s possibly already involved in the Button trade. Similarly with the Evans and Grigg families who may well have been in Smethwick before then, also perhaps as Button Burnishers.
4.2d) Mary Shaw, John Jemmett, Rebecca Appleton, Charles Clark.
This branch of Rita’s father’s paternal family around 1776 were in Shiplake or Rotherfield Peppard near the Thames in Oxfordshire. In 1804 Mary Shaw married John Jemmett from Hurst in Berkshire, but who had been born a few miles to the north in Shiplake next to the Thames in Oxfordshire. Rebecca Appleton appears to have been born in Godalming in Surrey. The Clark family first appear around nearby Guildford where Charles was baptised by his father William in 1784.
Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Surrey, Westmoreland.
4.3a) Elizabeth Hows, John Minors, Mary Hows, Thomas Bearcroft.
The Hows family were tailors of Chipping Camden who married both into the Minors family (also tailors) from the same village, and into the Bearcroft family from nearby Blockley. There the Bearcrofts were bakers, surveyors and Parish Clerks.
4.3b) Esther Dowdeswell, William Burrows, Ann Hobbs, William Smith.
In the 1770s Esther Dowdeswell’s parents married in Guiting Power in 1775. Her husband William Burrows lived in nearby Winchcombe. Ann Hobbs came from a Cheltenham family whereas William Smith we think was born in 1790 in Brockworth, now part of the larger city of Gloucester.
4.3c) Hannah & Thomas Woodbridge, Mary Deadman, Thomas Budd.
The Wooldridge family were in and around Winchester in the late 1770s. In later census returns Thomas Wooldridge was a Grocer, but all of these families became involved, probably as servants in the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The Deadman family came originally from Kingston upon Thames. The Budd family has roots south of London but in 1770 were in nearby Farnham in Surrey.
4.3d) Mary Gaitskell, Joseph Vickers, Margaret Minikin, Richard Hayes.
The Gaitskell family were butchers and farmers in Crossthwaite, between Kendal and Lake Windermere for most of the 1700s, while the Vickers family were in Workington on the Cumbrian coast. The Minikens were to be found in Yealand Redmayne in northern Lancashire close to Arnside in Southern Cumbria where we find the Hayes family in 1770. In 1781 Richard Hays was described as a Mariner.
Shropshire, Cheshire and Yorkshire and Birmingham.
4.4a) Margaret & William Whittall, Unknown, Unknown Mr Anslow.
The Whittall family appear to have been a very poor family back in the 1700s. They are earliest found as washers and cleaners originally from Lydham, outside Bishops Castle in Shropshire. John Anslow was born in 1825 and emerges from somewhere in the area between Wolverhampton and Walsall and was at times a bridle-bit maker and a coal miner. As yet we are yet to identify family or parentage further back for either of these families.
4.4b) Sarah Massey, Charles Birchall, Unknown, Edwin Smith.
This line begins with the Massey family, farmers from Much Wenlock in Shropshire. They married into the Birchalls, a farming family from across the Cheshire plain from Nantwich to Wybunbury. This is cow country. Meanwhile Edwin Smith was a stone mason. He appears to have been born in Dewsbury in Yorkshire in 1818 – perhaps also his father Edwin was born there but we have found no record of this nor of his mother.
4.4c) Esther Green, William Walford, Ann Thomas, Richard Clews.
The families of Green, Walford, Thomas and Clews appear to have been based almost entirely across the Birmingham plateau back in the late 1700s. In Birmingham they were brassfounders, casters and candlestick makers.
4.4d) Hannah Carr, Francis Austin, Mary & Joseph Wells.
The Carr and Austin families were resident in the Staffordshire Moorlands on the edge of Derbyshire around Alstonfield, Milldale and Kingsley, where Francis Austin became a blacksmith. This is an agricultural area near Leek and 24 miles to the east of what is now Stoke on Trent. We have no reason to believe that Joseph Wells was anything else but a Farmer and a Steward at the local Catholic Seminary. Nor was he likely to have been anywhere other than Erdington on the north-eastern edges of Birmingham in 1770 (see other maps). His wife was probably a fellow recusant Catholic called Hannah from the same area, perhaps close to Maryvale at Old Oscott.
Herefordshire, Bedfordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire.
4.5a) Sarah Jones, Richard Cobbin, Mary Symonds, James Hardman.
In the 1770s the Cobbin family were living just outside Ludlow where Richard had been born around 1770, his wife Sarah (nee Jones) in Lingen, Shropshire in 1766, twelve miles to the southwest. At the time Hereford was home to both the Hardman and Symonds families who were tradesmen across the town.
4.5b)Fanny Dodd, John Stevens, Joanna Houghton, Richard Ingram.
The families of Stevens and Dodd were in Woburn in Bedfordshire towards the end of the 1700s. Joanna Houghton came from Feckenham in Worcestershire and the Ingram family were living in the small villages of Bentley or Tardebigge in Warwickshire, just to the east of Bromsgrove where John Ingram was a soap-maker.
4.5c) Elizabeth & Joseph Hall, Mary Wilkinson, Thomas Whiston.
The Hall family were in Buerton at the top of the hill to the east of Audlem, Cheshire around 1770, midway between Nantwich to the north and Market Drayton to the south. It is there we also find records of Mary Wilkinson and her marriage to Thomas Whiston whose family come from closer to Stoke on Trent.
4.5d)Sarah/Elizabeth Randalls, William Jervis, Sarah Perry, James Crutchley.
The families of Randalls, Jervis, Perry and Crutchley all were to be found in or around what is today Market Drayton, and up the hill at Almington on the border between Shropshire, Cheshire and Staffordshire, about half-way between Stoke on Trent and Shrewsbury. Generally again they were agriculturally based, occasionally described as farmers and shoemakers.
Shropshire and Staffordshire, including the Black Country.
4.6a) Elizabeth Cartwright, Samuel Heath, Margaret Tasker, Francis Bray.
The families of Heath and Cartwright may well have been around the Black Country, or in Birmingham or Aston by the start of industrialisation. However the Bray and Tasker families were all living around the Clee Hills in 1770, in Abdon, Clee St Margaret and Stoke St Millborough, halfway between Much Wenlock and Ludlow.
4.6b) Elizabeth Elsemore, Benjamin Derry, Martha Nixon, Thomas Barnes.
The Elsemore family were in Yoxall, and the Derry family in Burntwood in the 1770s likely agriculturally based around Lichfield, Staffordshire. Meanwhile Thomas Barnes and Martha Nixon were raising their family in Farewell just outside the town.
4.6c) Sarah hands, William Reeves, Mary/Esther & John/Joseph Carter.
The Reeves and Carter families were spread across what is now Birmingham and the Black Country in 1770 and were probably in the metal trades. There are few baptismal or marriage records that have yet surfaced. Joseph Carter was a gilt-toy maker at marriage .
4.6d)Unknown, Unknown, Unknown, Unknown Mr Cork.
We have not got too far back with the Cork family where Samuel was married to Ann when in Wolverhampton in 1817 they brought their son John to St Peter’s Collegiate church in the Town to be baptised. Twenty years later at John’s marriage, Samuel was described as a Caster whereas John was a corkscrew maker or steel-toy maker. We have found no records for Samuel’s birth, nor for his marriage to Ann. Ann meanwhile is the only 3rd Gt Grandparent for whom we do not have a maiden name nor any other detail.
Black Country, Shropshire, Staffordshire.
4.7a) Hannah Granger, Isaac Hadley, Lucy Whitehouse, Joseph Peace.
In the 1770s the Hadley family is extremely widespread across the area around Stourbridge, Halesowen, Oldbury and Rowley Regis. Whitehouse and Peace are other regular Black Country names across Walsall, Bloxwich, Oldbury and Smethwick. They were coal miners and stone miners, brassfounders and nail-makers. But they could also be farmers and potato dealers, and some of them owned properties.
4.7b) Mary Whitehouse, Benjamin Hadley, Letitia Goode, Daniel Hadley.
Another branch of the Hadley family was also across most of what is now called the Black Country. How they are all related is difficult to follow. They were certainly there in 1770, as were the Goode family into whom they married, when they were not marrying other Hadleys who were probably related sometime further back. As before their professions could be varied.
4.7c) Mary Johnson, Gabriel Garbett, Phoebe Hardwick, Samuel Lloyd.
In the 1770s the Garbett and Johnson families were found in Dawley Magna, part of what is now the Telford conurbation, not far from Ironbridge. In the late 1700s the Lloyd family appear in Willenhall halfway between Wolverhampton and Walsall where the Hardwick family is also found.
4.7d) Mary & John Cadman, Mary Payne, William Colley.
As the Industrial revolutions dawned around them the Cadman family were living in Wombridge, part of what is today the Telford conurbation on the A5 both near to Ironbridge and between Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury. Meanwhile Loppington, a small village just to the west of Wem and 12 miles north of Shrewsbury is where we find the Payne and Colley families in the 1770s.
Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Black Country, Birmingham.
4.8a) Hannah Payne, Job Chinn, Sarah Bolstridge, William Hulk.
Hannah Payne possibly was living in Towcester, Northamptonshire before she married Job Chinn in Coventry in 1785. Job Chinn was brought up in Lapworth near Knowle in 1770 and is almost certainly related to the family of Carl Chinn, local personality and historian. Hulk is an interesting name that may have earlier arrived from abroad perhaps as part of some religious persecution such as faced by the Huguenots. It is common on the continent at the time. We find the name in Coventry when William Hulk married Sarah Bolstridge in 1796. Bolstridge potentially comes from a name that has been taken back hundreds of years in a one-name study being based around Bedworth and Astley.
4.8b) Jane Beaufoy, John Keene, Ann Pearmain, William Horsfall.
The Beaufoy name dates from 1770 in Packwood near Lapworth, Knowle, in Warwickshire, although Jane Beaufoy married John Keene in Coventry in 1781. Horsfall is a Yorkshire name but we have it first in Coventry in 1737 where they were later joined by both the Keene and Pearmain families.
4.8c) Sarah Gaunt, William Roberts, Ann Richdale, Charles Perry.
The Roberts connection arises from Calf Heath around 1800 in the countryside just outside of Wolverhampton but it has been hard to make further progress in that area. Perry is another Black Country name that we have traced back to in around 1770 around Bilston, Willenhall and Dudley. They married locally around 1790 to the Richdale family
4.8d) Susannah Blaby, John Dean, Elizabeth Clark, Richard West.
This branch of the family were in Oxfordshire in the 1770s starting with the Blaby family of Sandford St Martin who married into the Dean family of nearby Great Tew back in the late 1700s. Meanwhile the Clark and West families were living in Chadlington and Kiddington where they were labourers and may have met Capability Brown.
But Came They All to Birmingham 