Samuel Wagstaff 1820

In this posting I will concentrate on my immigrant ancestor, Samuel Wagstaff, his wife Lucy Mariah Webb and their children who came from the village of Upper Caldecot in the parish of Northill, Bedfordshire in 1862. They settled in American Fork, Utah where they homesteaded the farm where I was reared. Samuel as a devout Mormon married three additional wives in polygamy. As an aging homely man of no great position in society, he did not get to marry the pretty young maidens. Instead he married two widows with children and a middle aged blind woman. Lucy, his first wife, seemed to be supportive of the arrangement but the law took a different view. He served time in the Utah State Prison for polygamy. Samuel wrote a journal the original of which is housed in Special Collections at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. There are plans to put a scanned copy and typed transcript here in this blog if anyone indicates they are interested. No mention is made in his journal of any member of his three polygamous families. It has been assumed he was trying to hide evidence of polygamy.

Samuel Wagstaff was born 20 Oct 1820 in the village of Upper Caldicote, Bedfordshire, England and christened 19 Nov 1820 at the Northill Parish Church about an hour’s walk through the rich farmland. At present, rose farms are on land formerly used to grow potatoes, onions and other produce for the London Market. They shipped vegetables on the southbound train at the Biggleswade Station. The northbound train brought back horse manure.

His father was Isaac Wagstaff and his mother was Mary Bathsheba Gillions. She was christened Mary and probably assumed the middle name from her mother Bathsheba Lee. The Gillions had lived in Northill for generations while Samuel’s grandfather John Wagstaff had moved to Northill from the nearby parish of Potton in the latter 1700s.

Although they were commoners and agricultural laborers, the Wagstaffs seemed to be better off than seasonal farm workers, the so-called agricultural laborers, who worked in farm gangs for part of the year and then were thrown onto the hated parish relief. There are some indications that Isaac and perhaps other Wagstaffs lived in tied housing on the Harvey Manor in Northill. Some Bedfordshire landed gentry and enlightened nobility such as the Duke of Bedford treated their workers with some degree of respect. Herber in his book Ancestral Trails mentions Bedfordshire several times although it seems doubtful that his ancestors lived in the same parishes with the Wagstaffs.