Parents of Elizabeth and Charles Bray

[tpb]

These would be my MMMMM and MMMMF.

Charles Bray (31 January 1811 – 5 October 1884) is well documented as a ribbon manufacturer, social radical and friend of George Eliot, (when she was still Mary Ann or Marian Evans). His Wikipedia page says his father died in 1835, leaving him and each of his 6 siblings a 'substantial inheritance'.

One of those, his older sister Elizabeth, (my MMMM) was also a close friend of Mary Ann Evans, (and introduced Charles to her.) Elizabeth married Abijah Hill Pears on 28 May 1834. In the 1851 census she gave her age as 48, so was probably born in 1807 or 1808.

The father of Charles and Elizabeth (and also of James, Emily, Mary, Ann and Helen) was named Jonathan Bray and his Will naming those children (with a codicil naming Abijah) was proved on 2 Jul 1835 (PROB 11/1849/24).

However, there is confusion about his marriage (or marriages). Several trees on Ancestry.com list a marriage between Jonathan Bray and Elizabeth Harvey, in April 1815, with Jonathan's occupation listed as 'ribbon manufacturer'.

The most plausible of those trees gives the birth or baptism dates for all the children, and a marriage to Elizabeth Harvey on 23 Apr 1815. She was the mother of the youngest, Helen, who was born in 1819, but not of the older ones. That tree gives his date of birth as 1775 and his baptism date as 27 Oct 1791, in Stoke, Warwickshire - see
https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/fami...98038171/facts

But I am slightly skeptical about the baptism record, at the Anglican parish church at Stoke, with parents William and Mary. If it were a nonconformist chapel I might find it easier to believe that this was a 13 or 16-year old. There is another equally implausible baptism record for a Jonathan Bray, with parents Joseph and Ann, at St. Michaels, Coventry, on 31 Oct 1792.

There is a burial record from Stoke, Warwickshire, dated 27 Apr 1835, for a Jonathan Bray, aged 57. That would mean he was born in 1778. The same page has a record of the burial two weeks earlier of a Mary Bray, aged 25.

His first wife was my MMMMM, but I have so far drawn a blank on identifying her.

One more point: there was another child, named Henry, baptised on 12 May 1815, at St. Michael Coventry, listing parents as Jonathan and Elizabeth (a month after their marriage). This Henry was buried at Stoke on 9 Jul 1829. Either Elizabeth was very pregnant when they married, or Henry was a child of the first wife, who then probably died soon after his birth.