Willoughby Staff (1803-1886) and William Green (1799-????).
My 4th great-grandmother and grandfather.
Willoughby Staff may have been born in rural Norfolk but she ended up as a member of the Mormon church in the American state of Utah…
Her birth, though, is a bit of a mystery. Census records suggest it was Hickling, a village to the north of Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk Broads. She would’ve been born in about 1803 assuming she was being truthful about her age to the census enumerators. However, the surviving Hickling records that I’ve studied don’t feature her. These are mostly the Archdeacon’s or Bishop’s Transcripts rather than the originals, and names were sometimes missed in error. There were definitely Staff families living in Hickling at the time. A John Saunders Staff was baptised there on 3 March 1806 to John and Susanna Staff (nee Saunders) and a Susanna was baptised on 21 March 1813 to Samuel and Kezia Staff. But the latter didn’t marry until 1811 so the likelihood is that John and Susanna were Willoughby’s parents, and that her baptism went unrecorded in the copies I’ve seen.
Willoughby wed Norwich-born William Green, who was born in 1799, on 15 July 1822 at St James with Pockthorpe Church in Norwich. After their marriage, William and Willoughby moved to Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast, no doubt for work. It was there that they had at least nine children – see their family overview page for details.
The 1841 census showed William as a beachman living with his family on North Quay. By 1851 he had become a fish curer, living among the Yarmouth Row Houses, specifically in Row 112. Quite what happened to William is a mystery but unless his wife was lying he must’ve died before the 1861 census because by then Willoughby was describing herself as a widow. Willoughby’s life then changed dramatically.
The 1861 census shows her living with her son Robert and daughters Eliza, a dressmaker, and teenager Susanna in St James’s Place, Bermondsey, south east London. Robert was working as a fish salesman. When the Greens were in London, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (more commonly known as the Mormons) was busy recruiting in the city and elsewhere in England. Brigham Young Jnr – son of the church’s second president – oversaw the church’s European Mission in the mid-1860s and the emigration of those new recruits to the epicentre of its strength in the American state of Utah. Willoughby and her unmarried daughter Susanna were among those who converted but it’s unclear when they did so – it could’ve been in Norfolk but just as easily in London. It’s possible that Robert and Eliza also became members of the church but I’ve yet to find proof.
I know for certain that Willoughby and Susannah emigrated to the United States in 1866 at a cost of £8 4s on the ship American Congress. It sailed from the London docks on 23 May under the command of Captain Woodward with more than 300 emigrants (or ‘Saints’) onboard, managed by Elder John Nicholson. Early on, Nicholson reported back to Brigham Young Jnr that two thirds had already been sea sick as they sailed round to the Isle of Wight! During the voyage, when they weren’t feeling ill, concerts were held on deck and many religious services were held.
They arrived in New York harbour on 4 July after enduring occasional rough weather and narrowly avoiding disaster when they came close to hitting rocks off the Newfoundland coast. They couldn’t leave the ship on the 4th because of the public holiday but it meant Susannah, Willoughby and the rest of the party were able to watch the Independence Day celebrations, which included fireworks and a ship being set on fire in the harbour. They eventually disembarked on the 5th and were processed at Castle Garden immigration centre in New York. Judging by the journeys of other immigrants, Willoughby and Sarah probably travelled in a large group by train and then down the Missouri River to get to a small settlement in Nebraska called Wyoming. Here they gathered in a camp to await the final journey to Utah, a journey during which they must’ve witnessed some of the scars left by the American Civil War, which had ended the previous year.
Those prepared to undertake this tiring and punishing journey were organised into companies run by a number of imposing agents. The Greens joined the Daniel Thompson Company on their trek west, departing 24 July from the town of Wyoming. Thompson’s account book shows Willoughby and Susannah had 190lbs of freight. There were 558 people in the company in total, walking and in wagon trains in the days before the railway had made it so far west. They and their cattle travelled around 15-20 miles a day according to the reminiscences of those on the journey, gathering drinking water and wood for fires as they went. They followed the route of the Platte River through Nebraska, always conscious of and prepared for Native American attacks. They also had to wade across the wide Platte River, arm in arm for safety, and sometimes up to their necks in water.
The party stopped at the trading post and military base at Fort Laramie in the state of Wyoming, before turning south towards Utah and arriving in Salt Lake City on 28 September. Several of the emigrants – mostly children or elderly – had died en route. For a woman in her mid-60s, it must’ve been an incredibly tough journey for Willoughby to make.
She settled in the remote district of Pinto, Washington County, Utah, and married Samuel Lees in 1868. The 1870 US census described him as a weaver but he died in 1874 leaving his widow a log cabin and a quarter of an acre of land. This was sold on 26 December 1878 for $38 and notes in the various accounting books held by the church suggested that at the time of the sale Willoughby “is nearly helpless, her daughter Susanna is very poor”. Now widowed, Willoughby moved to live with her daughter and her family, and the 1880 census showed them in Adamsville, Beaver County, Utah. Susanna and her farmer husband Henry Gillins, who was also born in England, had five children living with them.
Willoughby died in November 1886 and was buried in Minersville Cemetery in Beaver County, but billed as Elizabeth W S Greene. Her birth year on the gravestone is given as 1804. Quite when and why Willoughby started using Elizabeth as a christian name is unclear and it crops up in several records, and I’m also unclear why she the surname Lees isn’t on the memorial.
Samuel Lees is a bit harder to pin down but may have been the man who travelled in the William S Warren Company from Wyoming, Nebraska, to Utah in October 1864, born in about 1792 in England. Certainly he was much older than Willoughby so this makes him the most likely candidate.
See the family page of William Green and Willoughby Staff
Sources. All data has been gathered from Ancestry.co.uk, Familysearch.org, FindMyPast.co.uk, the British Newspaper Archive, Norfolk Family History Society, the Saints by Sea website and the LDS church.