I wrote a post recently about my 2nd great grandmother, Annie Noble Luce. I had occasion to look at and link to the entry about her in Book of the Pioneers.
She says there her parents were John and Elizabeth Quarmby.
We had no information beyond that until her grandson James Marker (1899-1980) decided to tackle the problem of tracing her ancestry. He preserved from his mother Hattie (Luce) Marker a tradition that Annie was less sure about her parents’ names than her statement to the pioneer committee implied. According to Cousin James, his grandmother thought her parents’ names were John or William and Ann or Elizabeth. She was so young when she was orphaned, she didn’t know her birthdate, nor was she even sure about the year. At different times in her life, he said, she used four different dates, all of which were birthdates of her childhood friends.* She knew her original surname was Quarmby only because when she was growing up the Noble family had a trunk with the name Quarmby carved on the handle. They told her it had belonged to her parents but after she left home the Nobles kept it and refused to let her have it.
Cousin James did quite a bit of work. For example, he extracted every entry for the surname Quarmby (and variations) on the 1841 and 1851 English censuses. Quarmby is a relatively rare surname but not so rare as to make that an easy project. He ordered records from Somerset House. He looked at American immigration records. And in the end he was able to piece together enough family pictures to make an educated guess about Annie’s parents.
Cousin James thought Annie’s parents were John and Ann, not John and Elizabeth. As his research progressed he became nearly certain they were the John Quarmby and Ann Wagstaff married at Huddersfield St. Peter in 1821. He was fairly certain John and Ann were converts at the Mormon mission in Manchester, partly because of the size and importance of the mission there, and partly because the surname Quarmby is much more common in the north; it originated in Yorkshire and is still concentrated there. In miscellaneous records there is a John and Ann living on the outskirts of Manchester. There is no record of their emigration, but he found three ships arriving at New Orleans in the summer of 1845 for which no passenger lists survive. He speculated that Annie’s vague memory of a William and an Elizabeth might have been the names of older siblings, who perhaps survived childhood and the trip to America but died soon after, probably at Nauvoo. Annie’s father was almost certainly the John Quarmby who was reported at General Conference as being recently deceased. There were some other odds and ends, possibilities that didn’t quite pan out but which he kept on the table. A Basil Quarmby at St. Louis, for example.
Subsequent generations have built this body of work into a seemingly definitive genealogy, with Annie’s parents now said at FamilySearch to have been John Quarmby and Ann Wagstaff. In the past few years Ann Wagstaff has become Hannah, because it fits better with the theory.
There are a few dissenters with this theory or that. I might be one of them. I think sometimes that I’m now the only one still alive who remembers that Cousin James was tentative about his conclusions. And maybe I’m wrong. I find vague references here and there to suggest the names John Quarmby (son of Joseph) and Ann Wagstaff (daughter of James) might be supported by contemporary records in Nauvoo. I’m just not able to pin anyone down to the details.
My thought, heretical though it be, is that the Noble family would have known the name of Annie’s mother, probably better than they knew anything else about her background. (Maybe they also knew her father John Quarmby before his death.) That means, I think, Annie herself, despite her age when she was orphaned, had heard and knew the names of her parents. It was not, as so often implied, a case where Annie was “too young to remember”. We descendants have overstated the tradition about her doubts because the doubts allow us to shoehorn the evidence into a good theory.
* I have no further information here. I wish I did. Who were these friends? How did Cousin James identify them? Did he just find other girls in pioneer Utah who were born on particular months and days, then conclude they must have been Annie’s friends? Did he look specifically for girls whose families lived in the same ward? Or did was there a family tradition about these girls? I just don’t know.
