Written by Margaret Wagstaff (MHW) Mar 1999
This web page project will attempt to find as many facts as possible about the lives of my ancestors John and Jemima (Topham) Dewsnup and their children. I have always been fascinated about my great-great grandmother Jemima because I have experienced some of the things that she has gone through and sometimes I wish I knew what she was thinking and how she coped with each experience.
Jemima emigrated from England and traveled with her children across America with a covered wagon but without her husband and arrived in Salt Lake, Utah in August 1864. I emigrated and traveled across America with my children (and husband) in a (station) wagon and arrived in Salt Lake, Utah in July 1964.
Her oldest son, Joseph, alienated himself from his family which must have caused her a lot of heartache. Some of my children also alienated themselves from our family for a few years and I felt a lot of pain. I often wished that I could have talked to her during this time to find out how she managed.
Some of the knowledge that members of the Dewsnup family assume to be true is, in fact, false and this web page is an attempt to separate fact from fiction and to gather all the information available so that all Dewsnups everywhere can be united with a common theme of family and ancestry.
Manchester England is where both John and Jemima were born, grew up, married and had their 7 children. I was born and raised in Manchester and so am very familiar with this area and the lifestyle they probably had.
I never knew any relatives on my dad's side and grew up thinking that we were the only Dewsnups in the world. During WWII we were very isolated and so we wrote to the "Children's Friend", an LDS magazine, and asked for pen pals. The responses we got made me realize that other Dewsnups existed and, I presume, lead to our contact with Arprilla Scow, and Claude Dewsnup and Richard Dewsnup when they came over to England on their missions.
My father (Nephi) had a job that required occasional visits to London. During these visits he would go to Somerset House, London to get information and then send this to someone in America. When I visited Arprilla in 1997 she showed me a postcard from my father showing the postbox (mailbox) where we mailed letters to her. I recognized this area. I remember my dad said that an official copy of a birth, marriage, or death certificate cost too much, especially if it turned out to be the wrong one, but you could copy it by hand for free, which is what was done for some of them. The date at the bottom of the certificates that are now in the possession of Arprilla Scow in Deseret, Utah is the date it was issued to my dad or copied by him. He found the information on Caroline (Bradfield) Dewsnup among others.
My dad told me a story that he was looking for information on Phoebe Dewsnup and a book fell off the shelf above him. He put it back, but it fell again and opened and there was the information on Phoebe, but it was spelled Falee. In the broad Lancashire dialect "Phoebe" and "Falee" sound the same. The book that my dad was looking in had the spelling "Falee" but these books are indexes and just show the name and year and quarter and are not the original document.
Oral history in my family says that the family sailed to America on the S.S.Siddons in 1855 but Ann had no intention of sharing her husband with another woman (plural marriage) so she marched him back to England and severed all relations with the family. If this is true it would explain why there was so little contact with the American Dewsnups. The "family" who sailed to America in 1855 was Joseph and the Ritson family. My father was brought up by his grandfather Joseph because Joseph and his wife Ann (Ritson) did not think that their son John Ritson and his wife Harriet (Towers) were fit people to bring up their grandson Nephi and so my father Nephi became 'grandpa's little boy'. So any family stories would be colored by my father's upbringing.
I remember working very carefully on a large chart that my father eventually sent to America. Imagine my surprise when Auntie Arprilla showed me that very same chart a couple of years ago with the red, blue green, yellow and brown colors for each line of Dewsnups. I was the one that chose red for our line because red is my favorite color.
There is another reason that I started this web page ( it is my husband Neil who does the actual work because I am practically computer illiterate). I am interested in obtaining a medical history of the family and would like help. I want to get information from death certificates and tidbits from family members about the health, or lack of it, of their families such as did someone move from one climate to another to improve their health or did someone have a chronic health problem such as arthritis, asthma, muscular dystrophy etc.
When I went to the Dewsnup family reunion at Gridley, California I was struck by the fact that
not only were there so many Dewsnup family members and everyone was so friendly and
interested but there were so many people there who looked just like my father, my kid brother
Oliver and my son Gary. It was kind of weird to see the family resemblance. Now I know they
take after the Dewsnups.
Margaret (Dewsnup) Wagstaff
1050 East 800 South, Provo, Utah 84603, USA