Discovering Family

A house servant, a governess, an engineer, a scholar, a hand loom weaver, a laundress, a baby, a widow, a baker’s boy, a nursemaid, a farm laborer, and teacher are occupations on one page of the 1851 England Census where my great-great grandparents are listed as living in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, England. My great-great grandfather, Joseph Wheeler, was the farm laborer. My great-great grandmother, Ann Wheeler, was the laundress. My great uncle Charles was the baker’s boy. My great aunt Elizabeth was the nursemaid. My great aunt Maria was the scholar. And my great grandfather Edward was the baby. Missing from the 1851 England census but listed in the 1841 England census were my great-uncle Thomas who was a police officer, my great-uncle George who was a shoe-maker, my great-uncle Albert who worked as a mason, and my great-uncle Henry who died when he was twelve years old. My great-aunt Jane who died when she was one month old and in-between census times was only found in the Bishop’s transcripts for Holy Trinity Church in Bradford on Avon. These people are my family and though I never knew any on them in this life, I feel some sort of closeness to them. The challenge to find the names of these individuals began many, many years ago culminating with their discovery this past year.

My great-grandfather Edward Wheeler (Edward George as he was called) has always been the family mystery. Everyone in the family who did family history looked for Edward George’s parents and siblings, trying to connect stories that were told about him, including the story of how he helped to invent the Wheeler/Wilson sewing machine and that when his wife died he sold the patent to Singer to help take care of his children. Edward George was supposed to have been born in Brooklyn, Kings, New York on 5 August, 1850, however a birth certificate was never found. My researching family members could only trace him from his marriage to his death, but not before. It was such a frustration and even I tried looking for him, confident that I could find his parentage. I could not.

One year an aunt who had been looking for Edward George told me that it was possible that Edward was born in England, in a place called Bradford on Avon and that his mother’s name was Ann. She thought that I could do something with this information since I lived in England. I took these small pieces of information and looked for Edward George again. The brick wall came up immediately, so I quit, thinking that Edward George didn’t want us to find his parents or him in his early years.

Several years past and in October 2007 my daughter, Rebekah, asked for some information I had on her father’s family and as I was looking through all of my papers I found Edward George’s picture. I looked at him and cried. I knew he wanted me to try and find his early family again, but how? I had exhausted every avenue of research I could think of several years ago. But the feelings were so strong, I had to try.

I looked through all of the information I had compiled over the years and decided to organize everything better. I also decided to try and trace Edward George’s life backwards from his death. I fixed a binder with sections for each of the known places he had lived. I researched each of these areas. I compiled a section that listed all of the stories people told about him. I researched these stories—the sewing machine, the railroad invention, his brother the shoe manufacturer, his connections with Edgar Cayce the spiritualist healer and Matt J Winn, the Kentucky Derby man etc. I looked again for Edward in Brooklyn, Kings, New York. I even bought a book about the early life of Brooklyn that told about the people and goings on in the 1800s. It was fascinating but didn’t give me any leads.

I found that Edward became a blacksmith in his later life and was said to be able to fix anything he put his hands on except clocks. Edward married my great-grandmother Matilda Elizabeth Thompson in 1887 in Kansas, United States. The family moved to Missouri and Anna Bell, Susie, George and Claud were born. My grandfather Marion and his sister Ruth were born when the family moved to Montana by 1896. It was here that my great-grandmother Matilda died in 1900 leaving my great-grandfather to take care of 6 children, the oldest being twelve and the youngest being one year old. My great-grandfather Edward tried to raise the children on his own but his work took him away from home too much so the children were farmed out to others except for Anna. From Montana my great-grandfather went to Washington and then on to Canada where he died in 1927.

I also started to look at Bradford on Avon and made another binder for my research in England. I couldn’t find anything. Do you know how many Ann Wheeler’s there are? And I didn’t know Edward’s father’s name so it could have been anyone. And then there was the story that Edward had nine brothers, no sisters. I thought that would help me, but it didn’t. Where are you Edward George? There were times when I would look at Edward George’s picture and stick my tongue out at him. Then I would cry and then I would shout, “Why don’t you want your family to be found?”

I would pray. I would try and listen to be directed, but nothing happened. I studied about Bradford on Avon and the surrounding area. I mapped out the streets. I knew the names of the people who lived there. They were becoming so familiar to me. I almost knew them.
Then about two months into this intense process and believe me it was intense for I was driven like I’ve never been driven before, my big break came. My sister Linda in the United States was doing a lot of Temple work and family history. One day she happened to come upon an Ann married to a Joseph Wheeler with a child named Edward. The birth date for Edward matched. Could this be the lead we had been looking for? At this point in the research, my sister was becoming as driven as I was.

I looked for Edward with parents Ann and Joseph Wheeler in Bradford on Avon and I found two families. Eventually I found that these two families were actually the same family, but many family members left and more were born before the next census. The day this information clicked in my mind I cried and cried. Edward had been found along with his parents and brothers and sisters. I was even able to match some of the stories. There were nine children in the family, but not all boys. Edward was born in England but went to live with his brother George, a shoe manufacturer, in Brooklyn, Kings, New York. Edward invented the pitless scale, not the railroad scale.

As I looked through census records I tried to look at the neighbors who lived by my great-great-grandparents hoping I would find leads to more family members. I became obsessed with finding the people who lived on the surrounding streets. I compiled pages of lists for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 England census and those people who lived by my great-great-grandparents. I couldn’t wait each day until I came home from work so I could find more names. I found street names. I found occupations. I felt like I was hyper-ventilating all of the time. How could I keep this up? Finally, while talking to my sister, I mentioned that the people from Bradford on Avon were after me and I didn’t know what to do. Linda felt the same. She said, “Maybe they want us to do their work for them and document their families.” Then I said out loud, “Okay we’ll do your work for you!” Immediately, I was calm and so was Linda. Then my sister and I talked further about what just happened. We then decided that Great-Great Grandpa and Grandma Wheeler would have loved their neighbors and simply wanted us to do the work for them. That became our goal. My sister began the Temple work process for the immediate family we just found and I compiled names and put together families. One month ago I finished putting in the 576 names of people from Bradford on Avon into new family search. It was a labor of love.
My sister, Linda, came to visit England in June 2008. We visited Bradford on Avon, going to the cemeteries, the churches, the streets, the houses where our family lived. We cried and knew that our relatives were aware of our presence there and love for them.

Were all the work, worry, and time worth it? Yes. Along the journey I found a distant cousin who has become like a sister to me; I felt the joy of the spirit leading me to find my ancestors; I learned about the railroad, sewing machines, shoe manufacturing, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Washington, Canada, county names, Bradford on Avon, workhouses, micro-films, Legacy, new family search, ancestry.com, volunteer indexing, and various other research methods; and above all I found a love for my ancestors that I didn’t know was possible. Joseph, Ann, Charles, Thomas, George, Albert, Henry, Elizabeth, Maria, Edward, and Jane are more than names on a page to me now. They are real!