William, Richard and Mary Ellen Brown (née Gornall)

Update January 2020

After taking an Ancestry DNA test over two years ago, I have found significantly more information on the family of Richard and Mary Ellen and the wider Brown and Gornall families and made several Brown contacts in the USA, Canada and South Africa.

I have now updated and expanded this post, which I originally wrote over ten years ago.

John Winchurch

Cornwall

January 2020

William Brown was born in 1803 in Wymondham, Leicestershire, the son of Hannah (nee Wileman) and Richard Brown, a tailor. He was a Master Tailor and had three sons and two daughters with Jane Hawley between 1824 and 1839.

Jane and William were married on 31 March 1824 at Scalford in Leicestershire.

Jane died in 1855. William went to Pennsylvania in the USA around 1861 and was there with his son Edward at the time of the 1870 U.S census. During that time he was cited for bankruptcy in England in 1865 and released in 1869.

Whether or not he returned to England is not certain He died about 1873 at the age of around 70.

I am descended from William’s eldest son Richard Brown, who was born at Waltham on the Wold, near Scalford in Leicestershire in 1826. Richard’s brother Edward went to the USA – eventually settling in Almeda, California . Their sister Charlotte, a schoolteacher also went to America. Descendants of both siblings have records on Ancestry.com as does another sister Teresa, who stayed in England.

I wrote the following in 2008 :

Two days ago, I stood in the former Bavarian Embassy Chapel in Soho, close to the spot where my great great grandparents Richard Brown and Mary Ellen Gornall were married almost 160 years ago on 16 April 1849.

I suspect that Richard, who was the second in three generations of Brown Master Tailors, was working for John Gornall (Mary Ellen’s father) in the Regent Street area of London at the time of their marriage. They had eight children in 17 years.

Richard and his family are recorded in Birmingham in the 1861 census but his place of birth has proved to be ambiguous. At first sight (in the image view of the 1861 census) it appears to be Liverpool, but written above is ‘Waltham’., which is in Leicestershire.

It was actually his wife, Mary Ellen, who was born in Liverpool.

It was after I found a DNA link to Brown descendants with Leicestershire roots that I discovered the parish record of Richard’s  birth – the son of William Brown, (tailor) at Waltham on the Wolds, Leicestershire.

Richard died on October 18, 1866, in Birmingham, at the age of 40 after a fall downstairs ‘whilst giddy’ (as reported on his death certificate)

Mary Ellen Gornall – about 1900

The Church of our Lady of the Assumption and Saint Gregory

is to this day an active Catholic place of worship and the heady scent of incense greets you as you open the inner swing doors, to enter a place of peace and tranquility, which is, amazingly, so close to Piccadilly Circus.

John outside the ‘Bavarian Chapel’ in Soho, London November 2008

There is something very humbling about standing on the spot where an event that took place there, resulted eventually in your own existence as the person you are and with the history that you have.

I wondered about the life of the person in the photograph – a smart and dignified old lady. married at twenty, with her life in front of her as she stood before the alter in the small chapel.

Were there family members and friends sitting in pews on the railed gallery ? Or was it a quiet family affair, as she married Richard Brown, himself only twenty two. A young tailor, born in 1826 into a family of tailors , the profession he was to pass on to their son, my great grandfather, Henry Ambrose Brown.

Henry Ambrose Brown C1880