Billee Lura Fuller

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: 9F9P-XML
• Initiatory (LDS): 16 Jun 2007, SEATT

Billee married Living [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Initiatory (LDS): COMPLETED
• FamilySearch ID: KW87-VTG

Ivan married Marjory Ella Craner on 22 Sep 1931 in Caldwell, Canyon, Idaho, United States. Marjory (daughter of Delwin Ernest Craner and Margaret Jane Tadlock) was born on 4 Apr 1917 in Gooding, Gooding, Idaho, United States; was christened on 9 May 1925 in Idaho, United States; died on 19 Dec 1962 in Redding, Shasta, California, United States; was buried on 24 Dec 1962 in Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Initiatory (LDS): OGDEN
• FamilySearch ID: KWJV-K7K

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: KWZ4-RR8
• Initiatory (LDS): 12 Jul 1951, IFALL

Frederick married Margaret Mahulda Casper on 5 Feb 1908 in Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. Margaret (daughter of Peter William Casper and Margaret Maria Miles) was born on 11 Mar 1889 in Peoa, Summit, Utah, United States; was christened on 2 May 1889; died on 15 Apr 1965 in American Falls, Power, Idaho, United States; was buried on 22 Apr 1965 in Riverside Cemetery, Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: KWZ4-RRC
• Initiatory (LDS): 12 Jul 1951, IFALL

Other Events and Attributes:

• Initiatory (LDS): OGDEN
• FamilySearch ID: KWZT-948

Delwin married Margaret Jane Tadlock on 1 Jun 1916 in Twin Falls, Twin Falls, Idaho, United States. Margaret was born on 17 Apr 1895 in Oakley, Cassia, Idaho, United States; died on 6 Dec 1951 in Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States; was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Initiatory (LDS): OGDEN
• FamilySearch ID: KWZT-94D

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: 2CYS-PR7
• Initiatory (LDS): 22 Nov 1938, SLAKE

Notes:

A Brief History of William F. Fuller

According to some family letters written in the 1920’s and later, Willi a m F Fuller came to this country at age 17 in about 1864 from London, En gl and. Before that he lived with his parents in Fulham on Parson’s Green . H e came here with another young fellow by the name of Boyd. The two jo ine d the Royal Navy together in a fit of pique. He would not be a sailo r fo r long.

William, according to the 1861 British census, was a maltster as was h i s father, Henry. Maltsters make malted barley that is used in brewing b ee r. According to family letters, Henry worked for someone they referre d t o as Uncle Swonnell. I have no information about him however there i s a B ritish firm by that name in similar businesses today.

Henry was not a wealthy man in his own right but still he was of the mer c hant class and had a definite place in that highly structured societ y . I assume he had kind of managerial position as the homes in the Parso n’ s Green area, while not palatial, were manorial and of a much higher q ual ity and greater size than those of the working classes. It was an are a wh ere professional people would live. Many would have servants.

One thing seems certain: we are not related to the Fullers of the Full e r Beer Company. That Fuller was John Bird Fuller and I can’t find a con ne ction between our Fullers and his. In fact John Bird Fuller was no t a bre wer. He and some others were investors and took it over from th e previou s owners. The John Bird Fuller family originated in central Sur rey Count y according to Tony Fuller the current CEO. He was kind enoug h to respon d to my letter a few years back when I inquired of his lineag e.

Back to William. The story goes that young William had his eye on some y o ung lady who was from the laboring class. William was told he was no t t o see the young lady socially and definitely could not court her. B y wa y of explanation, the laboring classes in Victorian England were liv in g a hand-to-mouth existence much like we see in Third World countrie s tod ay. Even a minimally prosperous merchant’s family was required to s ociali ze among others of their class. To do otherwise was gauche in extr emis.

We don’t have the time frame down exactly but at some point William’s sh i p ended up in Boston Harbor. As was custom at the time, Marines were po st ed in the tops with orders to shoot sailors who attempted to jump shi p o r swim to shore. They could swim on the seaward side of the boat if t he y chose but that was it. William and his friend swam to shore anyway . W e don’t have any information about whether he was dodging bullets bu t on e can speculate. He must have survived because all of us are here to day.

William moved inland to Chicago where he found work as a gardener fo r a w ealthy lady. Working at the same mansion was a housemaid by the nam e of H arriet Winmill. The Winmill family was Canadian and had joined th e LDS Ch urch and was on their way to Utah. Apparently the two got alon g well enou gh because on 4 April 1868, in Chicago, they were married.

We don’t know how long they remained in Chicago but their eldest was bo r n in 1869 there. The second was born in 1871 in Utah. William never joi ne d the Church and remained a member of the Church of England (known a s th e Episcopal Church in America) throughout his life.

In brief, William practiced his trade as a brewer in Utah working fo r a S alt Lake brewery and operating his own brewery on the Indian reserv atio n near Peoa even hiring some Indians as laborers. We don’t have muc h info rmation about those times. We do know the Fullers lived in what i s now do wntown Salt Lake in an area called Butlerville which is just a f ew block s east of the Temple. The area was called that after the Butle r family wh o inhabited a large part of the small district. The 1880 US F ederal censu s has many Butlers living next to the Fuller’s. Later in lif e, after Harr iet died in 1909, William lived with his children in Emmet t Idaho where h e died in 1920.

The Old Country - Moving Off the Farm

At the time of the great plagues of Europe in the 1300’s, life for mos t p eople revolved around the farm. The aristocracy owned the land and re nte d it out. Laborers worked for the landowner for wages. Industry was s mal l but growing. As trade increased so did the demand for labor.

The plagues killed off millions but in the rural areas people survive d i n greater numbers. More and more trade gave rise to larger cities an d a h igher standard of living. Wages and working conditions were bette r in cit ies and so farm laborers began to leave for better pay in towns . So it wa s with our Fuller ancestors. Most people of the time never tra veled mor e than a few days journey from home so one can assume the Fulle rs origina ted one or two days walk from London. There was no public tran sportatio n and only the wealthy owned wagons. Laborers would not have su ch conveya nces. So, if you did not own a cart, and you could not carry i t on your b ack, you did not take it - for the poor people anyway.

London

Now some interesting stuff about the Fullers of London. If we had an his t orical family hometown, it would be that city.

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, William the Conqueror sent representa t ives out to take an inventory of this new land and to establish who th e a ristocracy and land owners were. (You can’t tax people if you don’t k no w who and where they are.) Up until that time, people seldom had famil y n ames, at least among the peasantry. The record that was made at tha t tim e was known as the Domes day Book. Copies still exist and have bee n repub lished many times. It was at this time that surnames began to b e adopte d often identifying people by their trade, personal characterist ics, loca tion and so forth.

The first Fuller I can find in London was in 1539. There were other Full e rs living in and around London but documentation is not reliable as i t do es not rely on first hand sources. The record is of a marriage betwe en El izabeth Fuller and William Leeder. It is fair to say that the firs t Fulle r arrived in London in the mid to late 1400’s. What the first Lon don Full er did to provide for his family is not known but there are seve ral prosp erous Fullers who engaged in private enterprise. Some became pr osperous b ut most worked for wages. Some were destitute.

Just which Fuller family old William F. came from is not known. The fart h est back I can find a Fuller couple that conceivably could be linked t o u s is, with any degree of certainty, William and Sarah Fuller who live d i n Bermondsey in the mid 18th century. I feel comfortable that they ar e th e parents of our oldest confirmed Fuller who is also a William bor n abou t 1772 in St Mary Magdalene parish, Bermondsey.

There were a lot of William Fullers in and around Bermondsey at that ti m e but the fact that these two had a son born in 1772 in the same paris h a s later Fullers inhabited suggests the highest probability that the y ar e our ancestors. (You need a scorecard to keep them straight.)

There are a couple other Fullers attached to our family tree on FamilySe a rch.com but the original documentation just recently released from th e Lo ndon Archives leads me to believe they are not related. Folks with a cces s to FamilySearch.com will see them.

What is a Fuller?

For those who are interested such things, a fuller is someone who uses f u ller’s earth and stale urine to clean wool or woolen cloth before it c a n be died or worked. Sheep’s wool has lanolin on it. It gets very dirt y , smells and can’t be died or handled until it is cleaned. The fuller w ou ld take the morning’s urine collection from his neighbors and family , sto re it in a barrel and then after it had been there for a few days , dro p a bundle of wool or woolen cloth in it and stomp on it until it w as cle an. (Everyone has to do something I suppose.) We Fullers got our l ast nam e by the trade our ancestors engaged in.

According to demographers and genealogists, the name Fuller was first fo u nd only in southeastern England. In the west and north parts of Englan d p eople engaged in this work were known as tuckers or walkers. It is sa fe t o say that any family of English decent by the last name Fuller orig inate d in the counties of southeastern England.

The Wool Business

Prior to the 1300’s and King Henry the First, English wool was sent fo r p rocessing to the area known now as Belgium where it was returned as f inis hed cloth. There was not much of a wool industry in England at tha t time . Henry thought this was a bad idea so he imported some of these F lemis h folks to set up and run an English wool industry. England had lon g bee n known for its fine quality Suffolk wool and it was in high demand .

It is safe to assume that it was about that time that our ancestors adop t ed the name. The oldest Fuller I have been able to find was Thomas Full er , born in 1400 or so in Suffolk where the sheep of that name originate d . I have no idea if we came from that county. In fact as of this writin g , I have found nothing that ties us to any county outside the London ar ea .

Grandpa William and Grandma Esther, Our Oldest Documented Ancestors.

How do we know William and Esther belong to our Fullers? That comes fr o m the family letters and is confirmed by parish records. William Fulle r b orn December 13th, 1772 in St Mary Magdalene parish, Bermondsey, Surr y Co unty, England married Esther Goom around 1810 as their first child w as bo rn in 1811. Other parish records show they had several children inc ludin g Henry Fuller who was William F. Fuller’s father. That lineage i s docume nted.

It was reported in the family letters that Esther was a Combes. Not so . T he documentation is clear. Her father’s will, and other documents, in dica te she married William Fuller. William apparently was in the fell mo ngeri ng (sheep hides) and glue and dye making business as was his father -in-la w Stephen Goom Sr. born ca. 1752. That information comes from th e paris h baptism record. I have not been able to locate a death record f or Willi am but the parish record indicates Esther died and was buried a t St Mar y Magdalene in 1837.

I found an entry in the London Times, dated April 1821, where William ad v ertised that he was renting his facility out. The lease was for the bui ld ing, contents and a house on Pages’ Walk in the Leather Market area o n Ru ssell Street that is south of the Thames river in the industrial are a. Th ey were advertising it for 41 pounds per year, which is about a wor kingma n’s annual wages. The area is now a railroad yard.

Where The Records Came From

The parish records for London area churches have been in the custody o f t he city of London since the mid 1850's. If someone want to research t hem , they had to go to London and search each parish register by hand. P aris hes outside London had been available for decades and many genealog y soci eties had cataloged and organized them. The hard work was done ove r man y decades. Not so with London records. The work transcribing the re cord s began in 1995 and only became available online at Ancestry.com i n 2008.

This was mainly a British endeavor. Transcribers worked to make these re c ords available to us and so provided an invaluable service. They took p ho tocopies of the records and transcribed them in order to make the dat a se archable by computer. I pasted an example of what a parish record lo oks l ike at the end.
Prior to the release researchers had to travel to London and spend count l ess hours combing through these archives by hand. It was a herculean ta s k and impossible except for the most dogged researcher. It takes minut e s to bring up a copy of the original parish record today.

It is easy for users today because of the work transcribers put in ove r t he years. Thousands upon thousands of names had to be read and deciph ered . These documents provide the best primary source evidence that ou r Fulle r family lived in Bermondsey up to the mid 1850's. Our Fullers li ved in B ermondsey for many generations before that maybe for as long a s two hundr ed years or more. We still have family living in greater Lond on.
Methodology

Usually relationships are fairly easy to establish if the populatio n o f a given family is relatively small and residing in a small area. If , fo r example, our family was traced to a small village of a few hundred , al l the Fullers living there would likely be related. In our case, th e smal l area is a mile wide with 11,000 Fullers living in it between 153 8 and 1 800.

The most reliable method of determining relationships is to look firs t a t the known home parish of the oldest known Fuller and assume he an d al l the other Fullers living there are related. That is what I did . I the n went to the contiguous parishes and looked for marriages involv ing a Fu ller where the man worked in a trade that was traditional for th e area an d whose home parish was near by even if they were not contiguou s. As lon g as one of the Fullers was from the target area and of the sam e class , I assumed they were relatives even if distant ones. I also look ed for F ullers on the same street or within the same occupation.

St Mary Magdalene Parish, Bermondsey, Surrey, England

The home parish for our Fuller family, circa 1800, is St Mary Magdalen e i n Bermondsey. That is where the Leather Market area of London is loca ted . It is on south side of the Thames River in a larger area called Sou thwa rk and just south east of the Tower Bridge. The civil parish - whic h is d ifferent from the ecclesiastical parish - is about six hundred eig hty eig ht acres yet had a population in 1851 of forty eight-thousand peo ple. Tha t is seventy people per acre. Nine other parishes abut St. Mary’ s and li e within 1⁄2 mile.

The printout I generated for this small area and the nine neighboring pa r ishes had eleven thousand Fuller names on it for the period 1538 to 181 2 . I have identified about two thousand of those names that could be ou r r elatives. I suppose the number of Fullers living in London and thei r envi rons at that time is many times larger. However there is no way t o be cer tain who belongs to who. All we have available are the incomplet e notes t aken by clerks at the time.

Accuracy of the Information

There was no common methodology for recording data. Some parishes record e d one way and others another. Not all parish records have survived. Mu c h of the data is incomplete and hard to decipher often written illegib l y or in Latin or in some difficult to read Old English script. The info rm ation is almost always meager and includes just the person’s name an d a d ate or two. Sometimes the parent’s and spouse’s names are listed bu t no t always. Seldom are relationships mentioned beyond the parents if e ven t hen.

I have been at this for nine years now, and I see no end in sight. Eac h n ame has to be researched to find that little scrap of information tha t po sitively connects it with a given family. Guessing does not count. T he on ly thing that counts is a documented connection. Like they say, “ge nealog y without documentation is mythology.”

The Family Letters

During the early part of the twentieth century, the London Fullers and t h e American Fullers corresponded. A few of those letters still exist i n tr anscribed form. In them the families discussed current family happen ing s but mostly they talked about what they believed was a large inherit ance . If they could find it they would divide it up amongst the family.

On the British side was William F’s only living brother Frederick. Fred e rick was a bit of a shyster if you read the letters written by Willia m F. s nieces. He and another fellow “researched” the family history an d attem pted to connect us to theanking Fullers complete with Frederick’ s recolle ction of spending many happy youthful days at the country hous e of one o f the younger banking Fullers. Each time Frederick asked for m oney to kee p working on the project because he was certain he close to l ocating th e will. It never happened. If you believe what the nieces said , all the m oney sent from the American Fullers went to pay Frederick’s b ar bill. Sti ll, it is an interesting story.

Side Note on the Banking Fullers

I can find no connection to that family despite what Frederick said. Aft e r spending thousands of dollars, hiring three professional genealogist s , in Utah and London, and devoting eight years researching this link , I b elieve it does not exist. There is no connection between our famil y and t he mega wealthy Richard and William Fullers of the banking busine ss and W estcott, Surrey. I came to this conclusion after the records o f the Londo n Archives became available. That Fuller family is very inter esting but w e are not related - dang it.

The Real Inheritance

But there was an inheritance; just not the one Frederick thought existe d . The real lawyer and court fees apparently ate one up. At that time, u nc laimed legacies were charged a monitoring fee by the handling lawyer s an d courts just for “keeping an eye on things.” The number kicked arou nd wa s £17,000, which would be about $400,000 now.

Which relative it came from is not known. Likely William F’s father, Hen r y, left it to him. However Henry’s wife out lived him by many years an d i n fact, remarried. It seems William, as oldest surviving son, was ent itle d to the estate but he never collected it. I suppose deserting the R oya l Navy put a dampener on going back to England. The military tends t o han g people who leave without saying good bye. No one could say youn g Willia m was a stupid fellow. Even such a callow youth could see it wa s better t o go to Utah with the Mormons and brew beer on the Indian rese rvation.

Jack Fuller July 5, 2012

William married Harriet Winmill on 4 Aug 1868 in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States. Harriet was born on 15 Jan 1848 in Toronto, York, Ontario, Canada; died on 1 Apr 1909 in Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States; was buried on 2 Apr 1909 in Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: L78X-KFD
• Initiatory (LDS): 19 Sep 1939, ARIZO

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: KWCT-KNS
• Initiatory (LDS): 31 Oct 1888, LOGAN

Peter married Margaret Maria Miles on 31 Oct 1888 in Logan, Cache, Utah, United States. Margaret was born on 15 May 1864 in Peoa, Summit, Utah, United States; died on 30 Apr 1959 in Nampa, Canyon, Idaho, United States; was buried on 4 May 1959 in Riverside Cemetery, Emmett, Gem, Idaho, United States. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• FamilySearch ID: KWCT-KN3
• Initiatory (LDS): 23 Aug 1883, EHOUS