Which Joseph Gundrey married Grace Quintrell at St Blazey 21 Aug 1830?
Research note by Wesley Johnston for the St Blazey Families Project - begun Nov 2013 - last updated 2 Jun 2015
The Problem
Two Joseph Gundreys were born about the same time (1810ish) in about the same place (Tavistock in Devon and Lopen in Somerset). One of them definitely went to Australia, and both children of Joseph Gundrey and Grace Quintrell definitely died in Australia. So which Joseph married Grace Quintrell 21 Aug 1830 at St. Blazey?
Note that I am using the spellings GUNDRY and GUNDREY interchangrably. Joseph and his sister Mary both signed GUNDREY the record of his marriage with Grace Quintrell. But he wrote his name GUNDRY when he remarried in 1838. Standardized spelling of names was not the norm in the first half of the 1800's. So it is best not to read too much into differences of spelling of names. My goal in the research is to identify the relationships correctly, regardless of the spelling used.
Thanks to Sylvia Hodson
In the master version of the St. Blazey Families Project tree on Ancestry, I had originally "penciled in" the Somerset Joseph as the one who married Grace. This version migrated to my public website of the database (www.wwjohnston.net/famhist/stblazey/tng), where Sylvia Hodson found it. She had done a great deal of research in the family and sent me e-mails which laid out her evidence and conclusions that Grace Quintrell's husband was the Devon Joseph.
While I place the conclusions at the front of this research note, they came about only from consideration of all of the evidence and were not pre-determined. In fact, they completely refuted my tentative "penciled in" conclusion, which I did not abandon until the evidence clearly showed that I must abandon it.
Conclusion: Grace Quintrell married the Tavistock Joseph Gundry, son of John and Ann (Dart) Gundry.
I have found images of all of the key original records for which Sylvia Hodson had index or transcription information, so that I have been able to verify that her evidence is accurate. I searched for and found additional records. Some of these are images of the original records. Some of them are index records or transcriptions for which I have not seen the original records but which I deem sufficiently reliable in the accuracy of the included information. I then evaluated all of the evidence, and I come to the same conclusion as Sylvia Hodson: the Devon Joseph, son of John and Ann (Dart) Gundry, married Grace Quintrell. Sylvia believes that the fathers of the Devon and Somerset Josephs may have been related, possibly both coming from Wendron (which was definitely the origin of the Devon Joseph's father). But since that is beyond the scope of the St. Blazey Families Project, I have not researched that possibility.
Additional Conclusion: Grace Quintrell's husband remarried Charity Bullen in Tywardreath and did not marry Mary Watson in Australia.
The husband of Mary Watson in Australia is an entirely different Joseph Gundry than the one who married Grace Quintrell. Mary Watson married the Somerset Joseph, son of John Gundry and Mary Marsh.
The Evidence
I will now cover all of the evidence and how I reached these conclusions. There are some extraordinary records in this case, including testimony in a legal hearing, that clarify a great deal about the origins of the Tavistock Joseph.
Birth, Baptism and Parents of Joseph Gundrey
Grace Quintrell married Joseph Gundrey (spelled thus by him) at St. Blazey 21 August 1830. (image at familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-22657-56727-45). Both are sojourners. One witness was the omnipresent Edward Merifield, who witnessed the great majority of marriages in the parish at that time. The other witness was Mary Gundrey (spelled thus by her).
One of the two candidates for the Joseph who married Grace was the Joseph Gundrey baptized 15 Dec 1809 at Tavistock, Devon, son of John Gundrey and Ann. The same parish has John and Ann's 22 Nov 1806 marriage, with her maiden name Dart. (John and Ann had an earlier son Joseph in 1807 who had apparently died by 1809, so that the name Joseph was used for their first two sons.)
The other Joseph was baptized 11 Mar 1810 at Lopen, Somerset, son of John and Mary. Despite many trees on Ancestry showing -- none of them with any documentation -- a birth date for him of 15 Dec 1809 (the same date as the Tavistock Joseph's baptism), I found no record of him prior to the 11 Mar 1810 baptism. (See familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/JQM9-64Y for the partial transcription.) So I cannot find any documentation of a birthdate for him.
I strongly suspect that the Somerset birth date of 15 Dec 1809 shown without documentation in so many Ancestry trees resulted from someone confusing the Devon and Somerset Josephs -- giving the Somerset Joseph a birth date which was in fact the Devon Joseph's baptismal date -- and the error then being copied by others into their trees. It is not only more likely that the Lopen Joseph was born in 1810 and not 1809, based on the date of his baptism. But it also conforms with the gravestone of this Joseph, which is included in some of the trees, on which his age at his
Remarriage of Joseph after Death of Grace
After giving birth Mary Ann (1832) and Joseph (1834) at St Blazey Church Town, Grace (Quintrell) Gundry died at St Blazey Church Town and was buried there 23 Sep 1835. (image at familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-267-11049-200374-86)
The Joseph who remained in Cornwall was widowed when he remarried 17 Jul 1838 at Tywardreath with Charity Bullen, the parish next to St Blazey (image at familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-266-11062-199866-72). So there is nothing to rule out that this was the Joseph who had married Grace Quintrell. And the geographic proximity of St Blazey and Tywardreath does favor this Joseph as having been the husband of Grace Quintrell. There is another aspect that weighs strongly in favor of the Joseph who remarried with Charity Bullen being the one who had married Grace Quintrell: the signatures of the Joseph in each marriage, although one is spelled with an e and one without, appear to be written by the same hand.
The Joseph who went to Australia married 25 Sep 1837 in Hamilton, Tasmania, with Mary Watson and died in 1878. His mother appears on his death record (Victoria 1878 Death Registration Number:12153) as Mary Masters, so that we know that he was the Lopen, Somerset, Joseph. Since I have not seen the 1837 marriage record of the Lopen Joseph with Mary Masters, I do not know if he is identified as a widower. In fact, I have not seen any record that the Lopen Joseph ever lived in Cornwall or St Blazey.
What the Marriages and the Australia Death Record Tell Us
We have two conflicting marriages, one in Australia in 1837 and one in Tywardreath in 1838. Children issued in each place from each marriage, so that they could not be the same husband. Furthermore,
We know from his death record that the Australia husband was the Lopen, Somerset, Joseph, son of John and Mary and not the son of John and Ann. So we also know that Mary Watson's Australia husband was baptized 11 Mar 1810 and not 15 Dec 1809.
We also know that the Tywardreath husband of Charity Bullen was a widower and that Tywardreath is the parish immediately to the east of St Blazey. And we know that the handwriting of the husband on both the marriage with Grace Quintrell and Charity Bullen appears to be the same in both cases, despite the difference in spelling.
The evidence is strong that Grace Quintrell's widowed husband married Charity Bullen in Tywardreath in 1838 and not Mary Watson in Australia in 1837. But it is not conclusive without further evidence.
Marriage Witness Mary Gundrey
Mary Gundrey witnessed the 21 Aug 1830 St Blazey marriage of Joseph Gundrey and Grace Quintrell.
On 6 Mar 1841, a Mary Gundry of Tywardreath Highway, daughter of miner John, married, and one of the witnesses was Joseph Gundry. It seems highly likely that these are the same Joseph and Mary in both marriages and that they were brother and sister, both children of John Gundry and Ann Dart. Their daughter Mary was baptized 16 May 1812 at Tavistock, their next child after Joseph.
While I have not fully researched the John Gundry-Mary Masters family, they did have a daughter Mary, who was baptized 18 Mar 1816 (see familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JW38-T9Y).
What the Marriage Witness Information Tells Us
The Lopen Mary would have been 14 at the 1830 marriage and the Tavistock Mary would have been 18 and thus of age to be a witness. So the Tavistock Mary was the most likely one to have witnessed the 21 Aug 1830 St Blazey marriage of Joseph Gundrey and Grace Quintrell.
Once again, we have strong evidence for the Tavistock Joseph as the husband of Grace Quintrell. And once again it is not conclusive in and of itself.
The Children of Joseph and Grace
Joseph and Grace (Quintrell) Gundry had two children: Mary Anne (1832) and Joseph (1834) before Grace died in 1835, leaving Joseph to care for a 3 year old daughter and 1 year old son while also working as a miner. So clearly someone had to take care of his children while he worked. And it was his family who did so. We can see this in the 1841 census, when Mary Anne was 9 and Joseph Jr was 7 and again in the 1851 census.
Ann (Dart) Gundry was the mother of the Tavistock Joseph. In the 1841 Census of Tywardreath Highway, her daughter Mary Gundry Perry is living with her, and so is 7 year old Joseph Gundry. On the same census image (on Ancestry at interactive.ancestry.com/8978/CONHO107_146_146-0556/520610), John and his sister Mary are both on the top line of facing pages, Mary is living with the family of their father's sister, Jane (Gundry) Bunt, with just 3 households between the two listings.
In 1851, it is Joseph Jr, then age 17, who was living in the Bunt family home (on Ancestry at http://interactive.ancestry.com/8860/CONHO107_1902_1903-0012/7040350), where the wife is now Elizabeth (Gundry) Bunt, sister of Elizabeth and of Joseph, all children of John and Ann (Dart) Gundry, all baptized at Tavistock. (Jane had died, and her husband William Bunt remarried with her sister Elizabeth Gundry.) The 1851 census further confirms that this Joseph is indeed the one born at St. Blazey, where the son of Joseph Gundry and Grace Quintrell was born.
So we find the children of Joseph and Grace (Quintrell) Gundry in the Tavistock, Devon, Joseph's family homes.
The two children did both emigrate to Australia, which adds to the confusion with the Lopen, Somerset, Joseph.
-- Joseph and Grace's daughter Mary Anne married Matthew Wasley in 1854 (Victoria 1854 Registration Number 3474) and died in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1911 with her death record (Victoria 1911 Registration Number 11605) showing her parents as Joseph Gundry and Grace Quintrell.
-- Their son Joseph married Ellen Upjohn (Victoria 1869 Registration Number 3626) in 1869 and died 18 May 1886 in Queensland (Queensland 1886 Registration 2813 on p 5847).
Whether they knew of the other Joseph Gundry and his wife Mary Watson in Australia, I have not researched.
What the Children's Information Tells Us
The children found living without parents in the 1841 households of the Tavistock Joseph's kin, then living in Tywardreath, are exactly the correct ages for being the children of Joseph Gundry and Grace Quintrell, both born and baptized in the neighboring parish of St. Blazey. And so also is 17-year-old Joseph in 1851 in the household of his father's Tavistock-born sister. While we do not have absolute definitive proof that these are indeed the children of Joseph Gundry and Grace Quintrell, the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that they in fact are the children of Joseph and Grace and thus their father Joseph Gundry was the son of John & Ann (Dart) Gundry who was baptized at Tavistock 15 Dec 1809.
Conclusion: The Tavistock Joseph was the Husband of Grace Quintrell
The great preponderance of the evidence supports the conclusion that the Joseph Gundry born to John and Ann (Dart) Gundry was the husband of Grace Quintrell. Here are the key points:
Thus the Lopen, Somerset, Joseph Gundry who married in 1838 in Tasmania with Mary Watson was NOT the Joseph who married Grace Quintrell. There is no evidence that this Joseph ever lived in Cornwall.
Two 1849 Pauper Jurisdiction Hearings for Charity Gundry
There is also no doubt that the Joseph who married Chartiy Bullen and appeared with her and their first two children in the 1841 census of Tywardreath (on Ancestry at http://interactive.ancestry.com/8978/CONHO107_146_147-0008/521773) was the son of John and Ann (Dart) Gundry. The Royal Cornwall Gazette of 13 Jul 1849 (p 6) and the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser of the same date (freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wbritonad/cornw all/1849/misc/jul.html) both reported the hearing of the Cornwall Midsummer Session of 5 Jul 1849 to establish which parish had responsibility for the pauper Charity Gundry. The RCG account says she is a widow. I have found no death records for Joseph, but she did remarry in 1854. It is established in the testimony that Charity's husband was the son of John and Ann (Dart) Gundry and was born at Shilla Mill in the parish of Tavistock, Devon. John's father's brother, Joseph Gundry (age 76) of Porkellis in the parish of Wendron, Cornwall, testified that his older brother John was the father, illegiitmately, by Elizabeth Martin of John Gundry who later married Ann Dart and had the son Joseph who was the husband of Charity (Bullen) Gundry.
Much of this was repeated in the Cornwall Michaelmas Session of 18 Oct 1849, reported in the Royal Cornwall Gazette of 26 Oct 1849 (p 6). The latter hearing was to determine if Wendron was the responsible parish. The earlier hearing had been to determine if Tavistock was the responsible parish.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is still the same.
-- The Joseph Gundry who married Grace Quintrell and Charity Bullen was born to John Gundry and Ann Dart at Shilla Mill in the parish of Tavistock, Devon and baptized at Tavistock 15 Dec 1809.
-- The husband of Grace Quintrell did NOT go to Australia and marry Mary Watson in 1837. The husband of Mary Watson was the Joseph Gundry baptized 11 Mar 1810 at Lopen, Somerset, son of John and Mary (Marsh) Gundry.