John Cheshire

John Cheshire was born on 2 Mar 1776, the eldest son of Edward Cheshire and his wife Eleanor. Details of his siblings all survive in the Cheshire Family Bible. He was baptised on 12 May 1776 at St Leonard’s Bilston and seems to have spent most of his life in the Smethwick-Oldbury area.

He married Priscilla Onions on 1 May 1797 and they had eight surviving children. The Cheshires were evidently a fairly wealthy farming family and John Cheshire is usually described as a Maltster. The family intermarried with a number of other farming families that form part of the research on this web site. Up until the 1830’s it was still possible to make considerable money off the land by providing to the burgeoning brewing and meat trade.

John Cheshire’s eldest son, John Onions Cheshire, married Charlotte Willets. His eldest daughter, Anna Maria, married Thomas Collins. Both the Collins and the Willets families were butchers by trade – but this appears to mean that they owned considerable quantities of livestock and pastoral land in their own right.  John Cheshire’s granddaughter Anna Maria Collins married George Downing, the younger brother of William Downing. A letter of hers to Sarah Downing her sister-in-law still survives.

John Cheshire’s fourth daughter, Sarah, married Joseph Hartill of Dudley and his granddaughter through this marriage was Sarah Cheshire Hartill, the wife of Walter Showell the important Oldbury brewer.

Of his other children Eliza married Thomas Richard Cooper, a surgeon and his son William married Ann Collins, the niece of his son-in-law Thomas Collins.

John Cheshire’s address in the 1841 census is the Spout House, Smethwick.

John Cheshire died on 1 Sep 1844 and left a long will detailing considerable property in the three counties of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. His wife Priscilla survived him by four years and she died on 28 Apr 1848.

Family of John CHESHIRE and Priscilla ONIONS