This week we welcome guest author Justin Baer. Justin got in touch with us after researching some West Yorkshire people who made their lives in the 19th-century United States. An extract from his research can be read below, and you can access the full piece in our Local and Family History department at the Central Library, together with a longer article on the same subject…

Sarah W. Fawcett (1825 – 1899) and Ann Fawcett were sisters (1833 – 1905) from the
village Wortley, near Leeds in modern West Yorkshire. Both their mother and father were religious “nonconformists” who raised their family in either the Methodist or Baptist churches, a tradition carried on by their daughters in the United States. Unlike their parents, both sisters married after passage of the Marriage Act of 1836, which allowed the sisters to be married in their own chapels. Soon after their marriages, both sisters emigrated from England to the United States, the only members of their immediate family to do so.

The mother of the sisters was Hannah Cliff (1795 – 1838), whose father was a wealthy
businessman in Wortley who owned a brickmaking company. This wealth may have assisted the two sisters begin their lives in the United States. Their father was Benjamin Fawcett, Jr. (1796 – 1866) who worked in a variety of occupations to provide for the nine children of the family. Three brothers of Benjamin emigrated to Montgomery County, Maryland where they operated a woollen mill. One of his brothers, Thomas Fawcett (1794 – 1871) married Lydia Cliff (1800-1874), a younger sister of Benjamin’s wife Hannah.

The older of the sisters, Sarah W. Fawcett, married William W. Brigg, a man from a
village near Huddersfield In the spring of 1847. The couple would move to Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee over the next 30 years. William worked in the textile industry and was an inventor who received about 10 patents from U.S. government. During the 1880’s, William had moved away from his family, remarried, and had a daughter with his new wife. Sarah later denied the legality of this marriage in a public letter.

The children of Sarah and William lived much of their life in the American west. Their
daughter Fannie Louise Brigg (1851 – 1917) became a teacher and taught in Native American schools in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Their son Charles William Brigg ( 1854-1927) was a farmer in Virginia and later moved to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where he raised six children. Through their son Charles, there are scores of descendants of Sarah and William Brigg living in the United States today.

The younger of the sisters, Ann Fawcett, married Benjamin Berry (1830 – 1862) at the
Baptist chapel in the village of Bramley in the summer of 1855, according to the Leeds
Mercury(1). Benjamin was probably born in Wortley. He worked as a gunsmith and secured work as a pistol maker for the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut. Ann gave birth to two sons before Benjamin died in Minnesota during the Civil War, under unknown circumstances. Ann would live almost all of the rest of her life in Hartford, as a widow. Ann’s only child to survive to adulthood was Charles Paul Berry (1858 – 1918), who moved to town of Carmi, in White County, Illinois, as a young man. Charles Berry became a lawyer and newspaper editor in Carmi. There are no known descendants of Ann and Benjamin Berry living today.

(1) The Leeds Mercury; Jul 07, 1855 ·Page 8; https://www.newspapers.com/image/390384646