ROOTS….My mother returned from a trip to England a few days ago and brought back this picture of Parsonage Lane in Bath, a stone’s throw from Bath Abbey. This, it turns out, is where my great-great-great-grandfather, William Membry, was born in 1818.
William moved to London as a teenager, where he worked as an apprentice baker, and, in 1839, was married to Mary Drew in the parish church of Islington. The next year, shortly after the birth of my great-great-grandmother, Agnes Membry, the Membry family sailed for America, landing in New York probably in late 1840. They spent eight years there, then moved to Covington, Kentucky for a decade, and finally settled in Marshall, Missouri in 1858.
In Marshall, William became a sign painter and Mary ran a small boardinghouse. The town of Marshall, like the rest of Missouri, was deeply conflicted during the Civil War and William apparently became a well-known Union sympathizer during this time. Well known enough, at any rate, that a history of Marshall records that “Federals preyed upon prominent Confederate sympathizers….while Confederates retaliated upon the households of Judge David Landon, William Membry, Snell, and others.”
After the war ended Agnes Membry married a Civil War veteran and in 1884 they moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a boardinghouse of her own ? named, fittingly, Olive House, after the Mt. Olive Presbyterian Church back in Marshall.
In 1885 William Membry died, leaving behind about $50 in “paints and paint fixtures” and $205 in two savings accounts. His wife Mary followed in 1896 and the two are buried together in the Mt. Olive Cemetery a few miles outside of Marshall. The gravestone reads, “He did unto others as he would they should do unto him.”
