John A. Larsen                                                         May 25, 1990

2004 Terra Linda Dr.
Salt Lake City, Utah 84124
Dear President Larsen:


     I am back again.  I seem to be spending more time than I expected working on your 
line.  It is hard to put down, and my mind wanders to it even when I am working on other 
accounts.  Someone up there is anxious.  However, for my part I don't want to kill the 
Golden Goose, so I will spread my efforts out so that I don't  bankrupt you right away!
     There is so much to be done on this line that some of what I have to say is anti
climactic. 
I have been able to identify at least twenty two names on the Titensor line alone which 
will be submitted for temple work.  These pertain to the children and grandchildren of 
Thomas Tidsor or Titensor and his wife Ann Penlison.  To date I have proven five children 
of this couple, but I have also identified two other probable children, for whom I have 
only circumstantial evidence.  These two are Thomas Tidsor, and James Tidsor or Titensor.  
There is also a third additional child whom I have not yet identified but I know he 
existed.  
A Mrs. Margaret Titensor, widow, married John Hyde, in 1830.  They lived within a 
few blocks of the Tidsor family, and attended the same Independent church with them. 
 She had a large family by Hyde, so it is likely that her first husband died at a young 
age.  
With these clues I am confident that he was a son of Thomas and Ann, but additional 
research- is required to identify him.  
     Much of the research pertaining to this and future research efforts in this area 
will involve intensive study, meaning that in order to locate records and information in 
a large city like Manchester, I have to do a lot of reading, and leg work, going from one 
source to another to understand the system of record keeping at that time, and also to 
understand the historical setting that the people were in.  For instance, I am at the 
point of searching church records.  Manchester, has one central, principle church. 
Cathedral Church, which in turn is directly served by three principle Chapels, St.  
Mary's, St.  George's, and St. Dennis's.  In addition to these, there are an additional 
53 chapels which are either subordinate churches or rural branches, but which all have 
ties to the central church.  In addition to the "established" churches or Church of England, 
there were at least that many again of "nonconformist" churches, of which the Mormons were 
one.  Manchester being on a river, made it a port city, and it was the heart of Industrial 
England, which was just developing at that time.  Consequently, it was also a transient 
city, and had many people of many cultures and religion coming into it.  People looking 
for work were also coming because of the many big industry businesses that were 
opening up in Manchester, such as Iron Foundries, Steel and Iron Manufacturers, 
Railroad industries, and other such companies.  The Titensors were among these.  
It is evident, just from the very few Titensors and Tidsors who appear in the City records 
that Thomas was among the very first of that name to come into that city.  When he came, 
it was as a hatter, and he trained all of his sons to be hatters as well.  This they did, 
until about 1850,and then they began leaving the hatting business and began working in the 
Manchester factories, becoming Iron Dressers, Moulders, and Machinists.  These new 
businesses heralded a time of change for the people, and many of the working class 
became freer thinkers and changed their religious beliefs.  The Titensors, or Tidsors as 
they commonly were called, like all other people at that time married in the Cathedral 
Church, because it was the law that all marriages had to be done by the recognized legal 
authorities, and the only recognized legal authorities in England were the Episcopal 
Ministers.  The central church was like the town hall and justice of the peace.  However, 
since the people married there; sometimes they also attended church there.  This remained 
the case until the 1850's when the law changed and other persons were permitted to perform 
marriages.  To find your family I had to find them; literally.  I had to identify where in 
Manchester they were.  I located a variety of early maps showing the streets and roads 
of Manchester from as early as 1788 to as recent as 1881.  Using city street directories, 
I began looking for Sandford St., Pott St., Peel St., and a number of other streets on 
which I had found your families in the 1851 census.  I found Pott Street in the Northeastern 
quadrant of the city.  But I didn't locate Sandford Street until looking at the 1881 map and 
using the 1912 city directory.  It had been named in earlier directories but without a 
suitable description, and the maps prior to 1881 didn't show the names of the smaller streets.  
The 1881 map shows Sandford Street junctioning with Pott Street midway up Pott Street.  
Sandford was all of one block long.  The system for numbering the residences in England 
was to start at the north or west mouth of the street and number 1, 2, 3, 4, ... and so on 
to the end of the street then cross over to the bottom of the street and continue the 
numbering until you got back to the beginning.  Thus the buildings in which the Tidsors 
resided were the buildings on the north side of the street, near the junction with Pott Street.  
Finding this out may seem like making too big of a deal over an address, but what it told 
me was very useful.  First of all, for a Street as small as Sandford St, in a city as large as 
Manchester, it becomes more of a probability rather than a coincidence when a Tidsor 
or Titensor appears on that street.  That is the situation with James Titensor.  I have only 
one record mentioning James Tittenser (the most common spelling of your family name).  
That was in the marriage record of his son William Tittenser to Dinah Broom in 1855. 
The record stated that James was a plumber, and that William his son, who was age 23, 
resided at Sandford Street.  William was born in 1832, at the time when Thomas Tidsor's 
older children were newly married and having children.  It certainly fits.  The other reasons 
for finding an exact address, is that it helps in pinpointing the sources for other records.  
On the same block where the Tidsors resided, was the Chapel of St.  Jude's Church.   
It is very likely that the family attended there on occasion.  This led me on a merry chase, 
but to date I have yet to find if any records for St. Judes Church were ever kept.  It is not 
in the traditional lists of church records in England, nor is it found in any of the records of 
the Family History Library.  I may have to write to Manchester to learn more about it.  
St. Judes was begun in 1839, but the maps show that a chapel was there much earlier.  
My concern about the church is because none of the Tidsor family appear in the earlier 
Cathedral christening records, only in the marriages.  From the city directories we know
 that Thomas Tidsor or Tidsey was in Manchester, on Sandford St. from 1828 on.  His 
non appearance nor the appearance of his son Edward in the Cathedral Church records 
forces us to assume that they were associated with a chapel elsewhere in the city, or else 
they were nonconformist.  I began searching the church records in their part of the city.
     Several had been extracted by our Church, and some mentions of the family begin 
appearing in the 1830's.  James and Elizabeth Siddall had several children christened at 
Cathedral Church, and Thomas and Ann Drinkwater had several of their children christened 
there.  However, note that it was the daughters of Thomas Tidser, and not the sons that 
were associated with the established church.  This may have been an influence of their 
husbands.  Even still there are large gaps between children with these two daughters. 
The established churches searched included Cathedral, St. Ann's, St. Simon and St. Jude 
(different from St. Judes), St. James, and St. George's Oldham Road.  I also searched 
All Soul's Church Ancoats, and parts of St. Andrew's Ancoats. St. Andrew's Ancoats, 
was the only one of these that revealed something useful.  It had been extracted, and I 
compared the extraction index with my own search.  I found the christening for William 
Tittenser, son of Thomas and Hannah Tittenser of Droylsden on Mar. 12, 1837.  Thomas 
Tittenser was listed as a hatter.  I recognized this as the second Thomas Tidser who 
appears in the city directories from about 1835 to 1843.  Since your Thomas Tidser/Tidsey 
was a hatter by trade, and all of his sons began in the same trade, and also your Thomas 
Tidsor came from Droylsden, it seems to me  that this Thomas is indeed Thomas Jr.  
I have yet to find him in a census record, and unfortunately the birth of William occurred 
in February, 1837.  Unfortunate because, England began keeping vital registration of Births 
and other events in July 1837.     If we could have gotten a civil birth certificate for 
William it would have given his mother's maiden name, and the family's exact address in 1837, 
and thus help lead us to a census entry.  With regard to the Civil Vital Records I sent for 
the four birth certificates that I found in the indexes while looking for the children of 
Edward Tidsor.  Two of these pertain to Edward's children, John and Reuben, and the other two 
I can't place.  They will tell us more about the family.
     In doing this research, please understand, and I am sure that you do, that it isn't 
enough just to identify who children in a family are.  We are given a task to verify our 
records and information, and we need to find the records that show in some way that the 
information we  use is correct and if possible, complete.  Never the less, the Church now 
allows us some leeway, to approximate and estimate, when complete information isn't available.  
In the family of Edward Tidsor, we can find record for the births of two of the three sons 
born in his second marriage.  These we send for to get complete information, and the third we 
will submit with just the information that we have found, unless more turns up later.      
As I have mentioned to you when we last spoke, I have also found another daughter 
of Edward's by his first marriage.  This was found at the beginning of a search in the 
nonconformist records.  She was an infant daughter named Janet, who was born in 
July 1834, and died Aug. 5, 1834.  Her sealing has never been completed.  This record 
which appears to be a nonconformist record is something of a mystery, and I need to 
do some additional research to find out where it was and what the Tidsor ties to it were.  
It is a more extensive record, and I need to complete my search of the information. 
As I have come to the end of the time period for this report I will complete that portion 
of the research with my next report.  In the meantime we can wait for the birth records 
to return from England.  If all goes as I expect it to, I will have that information, and other 
information pulled together, and ready to submit for processing at the end of June.  I would 
like to make it sooner, but I feel that it would be pushing matters, and we would be more l
ikely to make mistakes if every thing isn't thoroughly checked out.
            Sincerely
James W. Petty
Genealogist

John A. Larsen                                                                 June 15, 1990

2004 Terra Linda Dr.
Salt Lake City, Utah 84124
Dear President Larsen 


     This period of research has been exciting because in it I have been able to pull together 
much of the family of Thomas Tidsor and those of his children.  I have inputted the 
information for their families in the computer to prepare family group sheets for them, that 
we can submit for temple work.  During this period I completed my search of the records 
of Christ Church (Independent) of Every Street, which is where the Tidsors/Tittensers 
were associated from the 1830's to the mid 1850's.  Unfortunately, the last few entries 
of the record are unavailable here.  When the record was filmed in 1971 at the Manchester
Public Library the filming was not completed.  Only the first 800 out of 1200 pages were 
filmed. The remaining pages however, may only be the cemetery inscriptions of members 
of that Church, which information would be duplicated on the burial register.  The records 
however, should have gone to 1855, but instead end with 1852.  Those records that were 
missed however might have contained the death or burial of Ann Tidser, wife of Thomas 
Tidser.  This Church record, mentioned in my last report, was found after studying the maps 
and determining the nonconformist churches nearest the Tidsor home.  The 1852 directory 
lists 65 nonconformist churches at that time. Others had come and gone.  Being non-
conformist, there was no organization to receive the records after the church goes defunct, 
so many churches are lost to us.  The Christ Church of Every Street is almost one of those 
churches.  It is essentially an Episcopal church, founded, by a Dr. James Scholefield, a 
surgeon, who, dissatisfied with the teachings in the established church, and being a very 
religious man, began teaching his version of the gospel, and drew a great many people to 
join him.  He established his church on Every Street in the Ancoats section of East 
Manchester.  Among thefaithful were the family of Thomas Tidsor, and/or his children and 
their families.  The church continued in full activity, except for a few gaps, up to the time 
of Scholefield's death in 1855.  After that many of the members returned to the established 
Church, or moved on to a church of their own choosing.  This record by the way was very 
difficult to search because it was filmed very poorly.  As it was this copy of the record is a 
penciled transcript of the original, and pencil is very difficult to film.  Almost none of the 
page  numbers could be seen, so although the record was indexed, I had to count pages and then 
read several pages for each name.     As mentioned in my last report, I identified a daughter 
of Edward Tidsor, in a burial record in this manuscript.  Also found in the record was the 
burial record of Edward's first wife, Mary Rogerson Tidsor, who died April 21 1837 and 
was buried two days later.  They were living at 72 Potts Street at that time.  I found the 
burial of a 3 year old boy, named Thomas Tittensor in 1843, whom I believe was the son 
of Joseph Tidsor.  Joseph had another son Thomas who was born in July 1844 and died 
at age 8 weeks.  William Tidser had a son Joseph who died in May 1852.  I found the 
birth record and death record of Thomas Drinkwater, son of Thomas and Ann Tidser 
Drinkwater in 1832 and 1833.  I also found the death of a Charlotte Tidser in 1849, but 
I haven't placed who she was.  She was daughter of either Joseph or William, but I don't 
know which.  In the 1851 census of Manchester, I had found the family of Ann Tidsor
 Drinkwater Abbott, and she and her new husband had had twins, Catherine and 
Elizabeth.  In  the census, taken in April, they were a month old.  The church record 
showed that both of them died in July 1851, aged 3 months.  I found the burial of Betty 
Drinkwater age 21, on Sept. 24, 1849.  She is the Betsy Drinkwater, who was named 
in the Baptism for the Dead records at the Logan Temple in 1886.  That record indicated 
that she died in 1849 and was a second cousin to Susanna Titensor Larsen.       This 
record filled in some of the gaps in the family groups prepared for the children of Thomas 
Tidsor.  There are still some gaps.  I expanded my search of the civil vital records, and 
found three more birth records to send for in the time period of 1841 to 1846.  
We need to search the period of 1837 to 1840, and 1847 on for birth records, and also 
the marriages and deaths from 1837 to at least 1870, to try to complete these families, 
and send in whatever work can be found.  In my mind completing the families of each of 
the children of each of the people on your pedigree is a reasonable set point to stop at.  
Further collateral work can be done at a later date when other work has slowed down, 
but right now, we have to search that first and second generation from the pedigree line 
to learn as much about each generation so that we can better search the previous generation.  
There are additional reasons for doing it as well.  Hopefully, by making such a broad search 
in the civil records we will also find addition clues identifying other children of Thomas, 
such as Thomas Jr. and James, and that unnamed son who left a widow prior to 1830.
     I searched the records of Ardwick Church and Groten Church as both neighbor the 
Droylsden area.  Droylsden was where Edward was born, and where Thomas Jr. was 
living in 1837.  I found no record for the family in either record.  However the searches 
were confined to the period of 1800 to 1810, and additional searches may be needed.  
I came up with references to a James Tittensor family in Aston upon Lyme Parish, which 
borders Droylsden on the east.  His family appear in a nonconformist record in the 1820's.  
He isn't the son of Thomas, unless he is a lot older than what I previously guessed.  In 
any case we need to search the records of Aston for other possible family members.  
Thomas and his family also lived down in the area of upper Cheshire during the 1810's.  
This is where Joseph was born in 1813.  It may be that the family will appear in some 
of the nonconformist records of that time period.  Considering the involvement of the 
Tidsor families with nonconformist groups in the 1830's to 1850's it is not surprising that 
your Thomas Titensor (son of Edward) and his sister Emma both joined the Mormon 
Church in 1848 and 1849.  One point that I found interesting was that the families of 
Joseph Tidsor, William Tidsor, Ann Drinkwater, and Elizabeth Siddall all had children 
christened in Cathedral Parish on the same dates in 1837.  It seems that perhaps their 
leader was sick at that time and the flock temporarily wandered.  As Dr. Scholefield 
got older, some of the members started attending the established churches more regularly.  
Several of the Tidsor children were christened at Cathedral Church during the early 1850's, 
and then all of them show up there after 1855.
     I searched the Probate records of Manchester for records pertaining to Thomas Tidsor 
or Tidsey.  I found nothing.  I did find his death record in the death indexes, and have sent 
for it.  It won't name his parents, but it will tell us how old he was.  I searched for his 
death records in the established church, since he didn't appear in the nonconformist records, 
but the records on film end with March 1849, and he died in September 1849.
     As mentioned I have prepared and updated the family group sheets of Thomas and of 
his children's families.  The birth certificates that I sent for have arrived.  I have updated 
the records, made necessary changes, and we can submit them for temple work.  Several 
sheets were already prepared to submit and given to you a couple of weeks ago.  If you 
have any questions please ask them, and I will do all that I can to help.
James W. Petty
Genealogist

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