News from the Mary Bennion Williams line
by Helen Madsen
I was recently saddened to learn of the passing on March 14, 1990, of Jack Bradshaw (born 1917), one of our “Welsh Bennion Relatives,” and a great grandson of Mary Bennion Williams, a sister of our Samuel & John Bennion.
As you may know, John & Samuel had one other brother and three sisters. The brother and one of the sisters died in infancy, but the other two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, grew to adulthood, married, and had posterity. However, neither they nor their families joined the LDS Church. Elizabeth married Thomas Davies and they eventually settled in Nebraska, while Mary married Joseph Williams and stayed in Great Britain. One of my interests in family history research has been to locate the descendants of these two sisters and introduce them to the rest of their “cousins.”
While pursuing this interest, I learned that Mary Bennion Williams and her husband Joseph had a daughter named Mary Elizabeth Williams, who married William James Bradshaw in 1870 and subsequently moved to Australia. John Bennion had recorded in his journal that he had written on March 16, 1875 to his niece [Mary] Elizabeth Williams Bradshaw living in Australia. He also recorded that he had received a letter from her from Melbourne, Australia, February 19, 1876. But that was not enough information for me to locate the family. I had written to various Australian authorities to try to locate birth certificates, but had been unsuccessful.
Then, in 1981 while on a BYU Study Tour to England, I managed to make contact with Jack Bradshaw, a grandson of Mary Elizabeth Williams Bradshaw. I spent a wonderful evening with Jack and his family. Besides becoming acquainted with this choice family, I was given by Jack a copy of the birth certificate of his father, William Samuel Bradshaw, a son of Mary Elizabeth Williams and William James Bradshaw, and born in Australia. Armed with this information, I was able to contact the appropriate authorities in Australia and received birth certificates for all four children born there. Further searching enabled me to put together the entire family, which included three more children born following the family’s return to Wales:
Born in Australia:
Joseph John Bradshaw 1871-1878
Mary Elizabeth Bradshaw 1872-1878
William Samuel Bradshaw 1874-1931 (Jack’s father)
Harold Edgar Bradshaw 1876-1880
Born in Wales:
Mabel Gwenllian Bradshaw 1880-1953
Albert Edward Bradshaw 1882-1944
Gilbert James Bradshaw 1886-1888
Following my 1981 introduction to Jack Bradshaw and his family, we maintained contact through a friendly exchange of cards and letters. Jack was a retired employee of the Goodyear Tire Company. We send our sympathy and condolences to his family: his wife Sheila, their daughter Margaret and her husband Timothy Wall living in Midlands, and their other daughter Gillian Mary Bradshaw, a graduate of Cambridge and teaching in Madrid, Spain.
