Stoke Gabriel, Where It All Began
Family Trees
Morry Family Tree
The full Morry family tree, comprised of some 24,500+ individuals at the time of posting used to be found on the Family Tree Maker (FTM) website. In 2014, Ancestry.com, the owners of this website, who also owned the Family Tree Maker software, made a business decision to no longer support this website and to focus all their interests on the moneymaking Ancestry.com website. The FTM website provided a certain degree of extra detail that cannot be included in a standard GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication) representation of a family tree, so this loss is a great pity, though indeed Ancestry had effectively abandoned the site years ago and had not updated it for years, since it made no money for them.
Versions of that full tree are available on other “for pay” websites such as FindMyPast and Ancestry.com but since they are not accessible to non-paying visitors I have also contributed trees to FamilySearch and WikiTree. The latter only uses the portions of a contributed tree that can be connected with other individuals already submitted to the global project and the former does not display individually contributed trees as such, so these are not really all that helpful.
Not everyone in that full family tree is a Morry nor even necessarily related to the Morrys by blood. It represents the entire database of people I have found to be in some way related to the Morrys by blood and by marriage and includes many side trips down alleys that are likely to be of little interest to those only interested in the main Morry line. Still, it gives some interesting insights into how one small family from rural Devon fanned out over the subsequent 16 generations to most parts of the world. I continue to develop this large file offline and have nearly 25,000 individuals in it at present.
However, for the future, I would prefer to narrow in on just the Morry family line, in order to perfect what is known about these blood lines. Therefore I am now presenting here an output from my Legacy Family Tree software which includes the blood relations only. The file also includes the ancestry of my mother, Evelyn Mary [Wheeler] Morry (Wheeler and Bishop lines). But keep in mind that this file only includes the line of direct descent from the most ancient ancestors along each line. It does not explore the other descendants of each ancestor. For that one must turn to the larger file.
It is important to note that the first person in the Morry line is now shown as William Mory (ca 1624-1692) of Stoke Gabriel, Devon. William was my 8th great grandfather. Previously I had shown four prior generations beginning with Gregory Mawry of Exeter, the man we believed at the time to be the sire of this clan. He was married to English Maunder and so, in the nomenclature of the International Morey Forum, our clan was called KLN English Maunder. The founder and leader of the International Morey Forum, the late Geoffrey Williams of New Zealand, was the person whose encyclopedic knowledge of all the Moreys of the world was used to create a possible lineage back from William to Gregory. But in all honesty I can no longer support the logic of these several tentative connections and I have therefore limited the line to begin with William, whose marriage and the birth of whose children is well documented at Saint Gabriel’s Church in Stoke Gabriel, Devon. From this William onward there is no doubt whatsoever that we are following a provable lineage of the Morrys who eventually emigrated to Newfoundland.
In order to focus in on certain lines more specifically, I have also included trees for the descendants of certain key individuals. The first of these is of course William Mory himself.
The second individual of importance to this line rivalling that of William Mory is William Carter of Sidmouth, Devon. This William was my 6th great grandfather along that line. He was the father of Robert Carter of Ferryland, the patriarch of a hugely important family of illustrious Newfoundlanders down through the generations. The Carters and Morrys were contemporary in business on the Southern Shore and, as these things go, there were many intermarriages between the two families.
For those of us who descend from Howard Leopold Morry and his Scottish War Bride, Fredris Marion Powdrell Minty, we are intensely proud of our Scottish roots as well as our Devon roots. Therefore I present here a family tree of the Minty line, starting with James Minto, my 4th great grandfather.
I have also made an attempt to research my mother’s (Evelyn Wheeler Morry) family but with much less success than I have for the Morry line. Her parents, John Thomas Carr Wheeler and Sarah Minnie Bishop came from poor fisher families from the Torbay Road area and from Trinity Bay, respectively, and in both cases the information available on these families is strictly limited to what can be found in scattered and woefully incomplete church registers. In neither case has it been possible to isolate with any certainty the origins in England of these two family lines. Nevertheless, for the sake of demonstrating this problem if nothing else, the two lines are shown here as the descendants of Joseph A. (possibly Abner) Wheeler and William Bishop (3rd and 5th great grandfathers, respectively).
A similar problem existed in Roman Catholic Ireland for records prior to about 1850, during the time when Catholic emancipation was just taking shape. As a result, the family trees of my wife’s paternal and maternal lines are quite truncated. The last two family trees in the list below demonstrate the limited knowledge derived from church registers for her lines (Morgan O’Brien being her reputed paternal 4th great grandfather and Patrick Quinlisk being her somewhat more certain maternal 4th great grandfather).
Click here for the Christopher Morry Legacy File
Click here to see the true descendants only of William Mory
Click here to see the descendants tree of William Carter
Click here to see the descendant tree of James Minto
Click here to see the descendants of Joseph A. Wheeler
Click here to see the descendants of William Bishop
Click here to see the descendants of Morgan O’Brien
Click here to see the descendants of Patrick Quinlisk
MORRY FAMILY WEBTREE
There is another format for the presentation of family trees online that has not attracted as much attention as it deserves. A software designer named Greg Roach created a format known as Webtrees and has made it available free of charge to any and all users. Apart from the simple fact that it is free, this format contains many powerful tools for manipulation and display of family trees which are not found in the conventional “for profit” services such as those mentioned above.
SWEETLAND FAMILY TREE
And now for something completely different!
One of the key merchant class families into which the Morrys inter-married in Devon and with whom they had many financial dealings during their early years in Caplin Bay and Ferryland was the Sweetlands. They seem to have arrived in this part of the world about the same time, but the Sweetlands moved on for other parts much sooner than the Morrys. One of their descendants who now lives in Australia (Jolyon Sweetland) has compiled the enclosed abbreviated family tree with some assistance from Kevin Reddigan, Enid O’Brien and myself. Unfortunately, because his tree focuses on the line of immediate descent to him, it doesn’t follow the many progeny of the marriage that links the Morrys and Sweetlands: William Sweetland and Priscilla Ann Morry, February 15, 1810, at St. Saviour’s, in Dartmouth, Devon. That information has now been more fully explored by me but is not included in this treatment.