© 2016 David E. Spencer
Author's note
This line of my ancestry has proved to be the most challenging of all my ancestral lines!. Trying to find people called Jones almost within sight of Wales!. Surely this was "Mission Impossible"?. I have made limited progress after many hours spent online and in the Shropshire Record Office in Shrewsbury but I am pleased that even this progress has been made.
In the early days of my search in the late 1980's I found that my great grandad Robert Sellers had married Sarah Jones at Whalley Range, Manchester in 1881. The other potentailly useful piece of information was that Sarah's father was John Jones, an iron trader.Thereafter there was a long gap before the births of my grandad and his sisters later in the 1880's when my great grandad returned to Longridge. In the days before the indexing of the 1881 Census by family history societies and the Latter Day Saints finding a family's location was impossible unless you already had a good idea where the family lived. In my great gradad's case he and his new wife moved to Warrington but this only came to life when the 1881 index was published.
When the 1891 census was released in 1992 I finally discovered that Sarah was born in Dawley, now part of Telford. We now enter the realm of oral family history. I mentioned to my aunt that her grandma after whom she had been named was a Shropshire girl. My aunt then told me that she had even visited her grandma's relatives who lived near the Iron Bridge when she was a girl.