John Fitzhenry - born in ?Wolverhampton in 1828 to Australia

Alan Hagenson sent me some details about another unrelated (to him) Fitzhenry line which his sister had put together and I put on the Blog in June. Here it is.

I was intriged that the origin of this line John Fitzhenry came from Wolverhampton, now part of the great metropolitan conurbation of Birmingham in the West Midlands. But in 1828 was an up and coming but still relatively modest industrial town in the County of Staffordshire. Fitzhenrys didn't come from there.

So today I had a road trip to the County Archives in Stafford.

In 1828, Wolverhampton had one Anglican church (St Peters) and one Roman Catholic church (Ss Peter and Paul). I started off with the first - I've found it's always easier to track down Anglicans(!) but he wasn't there, allowing for a couple of years each way.
As Fitzhenrys around this era were more likely to be new immigrant Irish and therefore Catholics, I looked in the range 1826-1832 for the Ss Peter and Paul registers. It did help that the Catholic population was considerably smaller than the Anglican one (and therefore fewer entries to wade through), but still no John FH.

So...checking his life in Australia, I found that he had married Julia Carter in Scots Church Sydney which is a Presbyterian church. Were the family non-conformists? I'd never spotted a non-conformist Fitzhenry this far back, but there were a scattering of Presbyterian, Methodist, Independent Congregation and Quaker chapels and meeting houses around the Wolverhampton area.

Unfortunately the Fitzhenry family didn't seem to attend any of these chapels either.

John may have been born in Wolverhampton but either it was outside the time span I was searching in or he didn't get baptised or otherwise recorded in the area. Any pointers to this man's origins gratefully received.

As an intersting side issue, the records for the Quaker births were interesting - not only was there a witness to the baptism of the child but there had to be a separate witness who had seen the child being born. And the marriage records were just lovely - each page was a written record of the words used by the couple plighting their troth and then everyone at the wedding signed the marriage certificate.


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