high on Exmoor
This is the Exmoor parish, and the one place in this story where you could stand in three separate spots in an afternoon. George Fish married Joany Crockford in the parish church in August 1819. Their children were baptised here across seventeen years — among them Joseph in 1833, who went to Bristol, and George in 1836, who sailed for Australia. Those two boys are the whole later story.
At Higher House Farm the 1841 census lists the household: George the farmer, Joan his wife, six daughters and two sons. Up the hill at Hawkington Farm their grandfather Joseph farmed. George died in December 1842, the day after his fiftieth birthday, and was buried here. Nine years later, one Sunday in March 1851, Joseph walked into that same church, sat down in his pew before the service, and died there. The county paper reported it.
One thing the record cannot settle from here. When George the younger sailed in 1857 the ship's paperwork gave his native place as Gloucester, not Somerset. Everything else the record holds puts him at Cutcombe — his baptism, his parents, his sister — and one line of that paperwork says otherwise. His sister Jane had married in Gloucestershire the year before. The record has not settled it.
near the coast, under the Quantocks
This is where the documented line begins. The earliest name the record holds is here: John Fish, baptised in November 1657, and his brother William in 1672 — and the line comes down through William. Four generations were seated in this parish.
William married Ann Sweetin here in November 1695. Baptisms, marriages and burials run through the register across more than a century, and the church stands. Everything the record holds from this parish it holds at one man's transcription of those registers — not from the registers themselves.
If you go into the church: this is the parish where a reading of the register itself would turn a hundred and forty years of this family from someone's careful copy into the record's own. And one more thing about this ground — Ann Fish, the emigrant's aunt, died in this parish in July 1880. The record's earliest entry here is a baptism in 1657. The same parish, two hundred and twenty-three years apart.
between the Quantocks and the hills
This is not a parish your family came from. It is one they went to, and it is here because of what it shows. When George the father died at Cutcombe in December 1842 the household began to break up, and by the census of 1851 two of his children were already living in this village.
Joseph, seventeen, born at Cutcombe, was a farmer's assistant at Carslake in the household of his uncle Alexander Conybeare Fish, who farmed there. His sister Harriot, nineteen, was in service in the village itself. Joseph is the brother who later went to Bristol and brewed. Twenty years on, their aunt Ann was living here too, with her widower brother James, a retired publican.
Six years after that census the youngest brother sailed for Australia, and the paper he sailed on recorded a native place that was not the parish he was christened in. This village is the earliest sign the record has that bears on it: by 1851 none of them were living at Cutcombe any more.
the county town
Two things in this record happened here, a hundred and forty years apart. Lewis Fish married Mary Cuniber at St James' church in December 1741; both of them were living in Taunton at the time.
And in February 1881 a will was proved in this town — Ann Fish's, the emigrant's aunt, who had died at Stogursey the summer before. It was proved by her nephew Joseph, a licensed victualler who kept The Sugar Loaf in Water Street, Bristol. She left under three hundred pounds.
The county's record office is in this town. What it holds, and when it opens, the record has not checked — so this sheet does not say.
Printed from the family record, 25 August 2026. The places are in the order you would travel them.