Map showing the distribution of Dredge Families in England and Wales in 1891.
Jesse Richard Dredge and Ellen Rhees were the first of our Dredge & Rhees ancestors to come to America. Both were born in Somerset. They met and were married in Monmouthshire, Wales. After their marriage in 1854. they had three children, two girls and a boy. All three children, Ellen Harriet, Sarah Ann, and David Charles, died within 14 days of each other during an epidemic of typhoid fever.
What a tragedy this was to them. Ellen gathered up the clothes from the three little children and gave them to the needy and did sewing and nursing to try to get over her grief.
Another little girl, Elizabeth Ann, was born eleven months later. It was then that Ellen and Jesse decided to join her brother, Charles, now living in America.
With their six-week-old baby, they sailed from Liverpool on May 16, 1861 on the “Monarch of the Sea”. The sea was rough and the crossing hazardous. They did not have a cabin as they came steerage, which meant that they had to remain on the deck of the ship. A great storm raged for three days and nights and during this time they had to hang on to a post, or something stationary, Ellen holding the baby, Elizabeth Ann, all the way day and night. It has been told that during this storm, one woman lost her baby. It was washed overboard.
Jesse and Ellen arrived at New York harbor on the 19th of June 1861 and they found it difficult to get passage from the coast to the interior, to join the Saints who were going to Utah since the Civil War had just begun. |
They made their way as far as they could by train, then by wagon and oxen. They joined up with the Joseph Horne and Homer Duncan Company. Because of his excellent ability to handle a team of oxen, Jesse was asked to go back and help companies of immigrants to make their way to and cross the Platte River, a very dangerous crossing. Ellen and baby came on to Utah without him.
William Henry Gibbs son of John Duggan and Julia Ann Tompkins Gibbs came to America with his father and mother and four brothers in 1863. They made their way from their home in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales to Liverpool and sailed for America on the sailing vessel "Cynosure," with 754 Saints arriving in New York harbor July 19, 1863. They rode a train to St. Joseph, Missouri and then boarded a steamer for Florence, Nebraska. They came the rest of the way with the Thomas E. Ricks Co. of 100 wagons arriving in Salt Lake October 4, 1863. |
