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Previous Section 12: The great American Mystery
Previous Chapter 13.C : ?
William F6(3), probably born c1630, is a key figure in my own family tree. He is the point from which clear and reliable links can be made directly to the present day.
Going back earlier than William requires some unevidenced jumps. He is, we believe, the grandson of Thomas F1 and the son of Thomas F2(2) who we met in chapter xx. The evidence for this is …????……
Sometime before 1657 William marries Elizabeth. Together they have five children. Two girls, Mary and Sarah, and three boys - John F24, Thomas F25 and William F26.
William may have been a brother of John F8 or John F7 and could have been a son or nephew of John F3.
John F3 may have been William's uncle. . If we are right in our assumptions about Thomas F2 dying at Wotton in 1638 or 1642 , this would have occurred when William was about 10. It is certainly a possibility that he would have gone to live with his uncle ( there are lots of references, in history books about the period, to older children going to relatives as "servants") and it does seem that John was of some small financial substance. Note how the sequence of William's children represents a mis-match with the often presumed naming convention. Instead the first born seems to be named after uncle John, the second after natural father Thomas and the third after William himself )
Initially William and his family lived in the parish of Sherston, Wiltshire where the first two children, Mary and Sarah, were baptised in 1657 and 1658 respectivly. Sherston was where John Brush F3, John F8 and other Brushes lived.
The remaining children born from 1661 onwards were baptised at Tetbury. John in 1661, Thomas in 1663(4) and William in 1666. And it was at Tetbury church that both William and his widow Elizabeth were later buried. The register entry for the baptism of John F24 in 1661 refers to William F6 as being "of Dufton" and this location is repeated when daughter Mary gets married in 1687 at Westonbirt. Both her and her husband Samuel WALLIS are described as "of Dufton in the Parish of Tetbury".
Dufton is presumably what now appears on maps as Doughton, a tiny village stop on the main road between Tetbury and Westonbirt. It is rather better known these days as the village outside the gates of Highgrove House, the Gloucestershire home of the Prince of Wales. but was in earlier times it was a manor in its own right.
Highgrove House was built, much later than the time of William Brush, in the period 1796 to 1798 by John Paul Paul, of the Paul family of Stroud, Gloucestershire. The estate itself came to the family through the marriage in 1771 of Josiah Paul Tippetts (later Paul - his mother's family name, which he adopted under the terms of the will of his uncle, her brother) with Mary Clark, whose father Robert was the local squire. It belonged to Paul's descendants until 1860. The Clark name appears as a marginal reference for the Brush or Brish family at nearby Westonbirt.
There is purpose behind this diversion into the ownership of Highgrove. The Paul family appear later in the BRUSH history. Samuel, the gg? grandson of William appears in Harrow in the early 19th century as the farm bailiff for Sir John Dean Paul and two of his sons appear as servants in the Paul household in the Strand in London in 18?? Does this association with (employment by) the Paul family (or the Clark family) go back several generations? Or just another coincidence.