The Mystery of Mary Davis

I've discovered another mystery with the Davis family. My great great great grandfather, John Davis, had a daughter named Mary. I always assumed that she was born in Wales with the rest of her brothers and sisters. But upon closer examination, I discovered that the census gatherers in 1851 recorded that Mary was born in the English town of Dudley, Worcestershire county, in 1846. Dudley is almost 100 miles north of the Welsh town of Blaenavon where the Davis family was living in 1841. When I looked at the 1861 census document, Mary is reported as being born in "Berbehard" in the county of Shropshire. Now, since the distance from Dudley to the Shropshire/Worcestershire border is quite short -- less than ten miles I believe -- they could have been living near the border. However, I've found no town named "Berbehard" anywhere in the vicinity.

From what I've read on the web, Dudley was not the nicest place to live during the 1840s. Back then, this area was referred to as the "Black Country" for the dense clouds of smoke belched continuously from thousands of coal-fired hearths and furnaces. These polluted the environment with vast amounts of soot. In addition to highly concentrated manufacturing enterprises, Dudley was associated with the invention of the steam engine (it was first operated near Dudley Castle in 1712) and in 1821 the first iron steamship was built in the Dudley area at the Horseley Ironworks.

By 1851, the Davis family had moved back to Wales and were living in the village of Trevethin, only six miles from where they were living in 1841. I'm sure it was no easy task in the 1840s to pick up and move 100 miles away to a new city. Certainly, work must have been plentiful in Wales in the 1840s. Wales was the industrial capital of the world back then. So why did they move and almost immediately move back? I would love to find out.

The mystery as to why the Davis family wasn't consitent in reporting Mary's birthplace may, in part, be due to the fact that there were numerous changes to county boundaries over the years. In some cases it was done to tidy up historic anomalies, such as tiny detached pieces of one county being entirely surrounded by another. Such changes have taken place piecemeal over many years, with some such detached areas surviving to as recently as 1974. One notable example is the northern piece of Worcestershire containing the town of Dudley, which was originally entirely surrounded by Staffordshire.

So, maybe the Davis family meant to say Staffordshire when they told the census worker "Shropshire" in 1851. If that were true, then the mystery of Mary's true birthplace could be easily solved.