Shep's Place Family Tree

They could not know what these promises would later require of them."

No. 158 William Carey of this Parish and Dorothy Plackett of this Parish were Married in this Church by Banns this Tenth Day of June in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty one by me Geo. Wathin, ...
This Marriage was solemnized between Us Wm CareyDorothy Plackett X her mark

In the Presence of Thos. Old
Lucy Plackett X her mark ‎[Dorothy's sister]‎

"On the 13th June, 1793, the missionaries ‎[Dr. & Mrs. Thomas & daughter Betsy and Wm. Carey & Family]‎ left Dover. The vessel in which they sailed was called the Kron Princessa Maria, and flew the Danish flag."

They arrived at Calcutta on the 9th of November 1793 ‎(just under 5 months at sea)‎.

June 1794--Wm appointed manager of a small indigo factory at Mudnabati ‎(Dinajpur District, North Bengal)‎, employed by Mr. Udney,who was the East India Co's Commercial Resident at Malda. Wm worked there for only three months per year; the remaining time he could do other things. There for six years. Mr. Udney bought a printing press in Calcutta for 40 pounds, which he donated to the mission. While there he was joined by John Fountain from England.

William Ward born in Derby 20 Oct. 1769. Died 5 March 1823 of cholera
Joshua Marshaman b. 20 April 1768 at Westbury Leigh in Wilts. Mar. 1791
became Master of a school in Bristol & studied at Bristol College. Joshua
and Hannah Marshman opened two boarding schools which provided 360
pounds per year for the mission fund. They also set up a school for
native youths. Joshua Marshman died in 1837 on December 5.
William Carey died on 9 June 1834. Buried the next day.

Wm. Carey's tombstone, as requested by Wm.:
William Carey, born August 17th 1761, and died 9 June 1834
' A Wretched, Poor, and Helpless Worm,
On Thy Kind Arms I fall'

24 December 1801 Krishna & Felix Carey ‎(15 yrs)‎ were baptized in the river Ganges.
1801 Bible published in Bengali.
1804 William appointed teacher of Bengali in the College that was provided
for the instruction of the East India Company's civil servants. 600 lbs/yr.
Later appointed Professor of Bengalee, Sanscrit & Mahratta. 1,500 lbs/yr

11 March 1812--hot & dry--fire at Press. Saved 5 presses. Lost the Ramayana & Sanskrit dictionary.

When the East India Company's charter came before the House in 1813 it cleared the way for missionary enterprises in India.

"...Carey used all his influence and exhausted every effort to get the Company's permission for the new missionaries ‎(Ward & Marshman)‎ to settle down with him at Kidderpur, twelve miles ‎[north]‎ from Mudnabatty, but all in vain. As a last resort, he set out for Serampore on Christmas Day, 1799, to make his home there." John Fountain did not join them. ‎(Wm. had bought an indigo factory at Kiddurpur when the factory at Mudnabati closed.)‎

"In a spacious house and grounds which they ventured to buy, Carey, Marshman and Ward...lived and laboured..." Also there were the Brunsdons and Mrs. Grant, whose husband had died soon after they arrived. There were ten adults and nine children.

‎[Marshman's]‎ last trial, from which he never fully rallied, was a terrible suspense about the life of his youngest daughter, then Mrs. afterward lady, Havelock.

"Marshman had been a weaver and then a schoolmaster. His linguistic abilities surprised even Carey. He and his gifted wife ‎[Hannah]‎, whose labours for the Mission and India were hardly less than her husband's, opened schools whose profits soon amounted to a thousand pounds a year. Here all the missionaries lived together as one family...having one table and one purse."

Thomas had a nervous breakdown by 1800. Soon after,he died.

Three months after the completion of the Bengali New Testament, Lord Wellesley appointed Carey teacher of Bengali, and soon after of Sanskrit, in the College of Fort William in Calcutta, founded by...Wellesley...

In a biographical sketch of Jonathan Carey, Jonathan is quoted as saying about his father, "The science of botany was his constant delight and study; and his fondness for his garden remained to the last. No one was allowed to interfere in the arrangements of this his favourite retreat; and it is here he enjoyed his most pleasant moments of secret devotion and meditation. The garden formed the best and rarest botanical collection of plants in the East....It was painful to observe with what distress my father quitted this scene of his enjoyments, when extreme weakness, during his last illness, prevented his going to his favourite retreat."

Jonathan says of his father two years after his death: 'In principle he was resolute and firm, never shrinking from avowing and maintaining his sentiments. He had conscientious scruples against taking an oath, and condemned severely the manner in which oaths were administered, and urged vehemently the propriety of altogether dispensing with them."

Illiterate was Dorothy, but not ill-chosen. Her father was a chief leader of the Hackleton 'Meeting.' Her oldest sister was the wife of godly Thomas Old. The second married a deacon of the 'Meeting.' The third joined its membership; and of Catharine, the youngest, there will be a noble tale to tell. The home was puritan, and the sisters earnest and lovable. Carey could rejoice on that wedding Sunday in his Dorothy, the 'gift of God.'

First Nonconformist Church in Calcutta.
"Carey and Nathaniel Forsyth, Bengal's pioneer of the London Missionary Society, opened 'Lall Bazar' on the first day of 1809; for the church was in the first instance meant to be not just Baptist, but Union.

"Only a few months after Ward's ‎[death]‎, it looked as if Marshman was to be....the sole survivor of the three. For, returning at midnight on October 8, 1823, from a Calcutta preaching, both Carey and a doctor-friend slipped on the Serampore ghat in the dark--to Carey's such injury that..he had to be carried into the house. The thigh was not dislocated, as was first reckoned, but it took one hundred and ten leeches through two days to reduce the inflammation. A strong fever ensued, with abscess on the liver, till his life was in despair. But the skill of several voluntary doctors...pulled him through.

From Joshua Marshman, 1829:
"Though soon to enter on his seventieth year, he is as cheerful and happy as the day is long. He rides out four or five miles every morning, reaching home by sunrise; goes on with his work of translation day by day; gives two Divinity lectures and a Natural History one every week in the College, and takes his turn at preaching both in Bengali and English. I met with few friends in England near their seventieth year so lively, so free from the infirmities of age, so interesting in the pulpit, so completely conversable as he."

p 51. Ward noted: "We live moderately and drink only rum and water. We have always a little cheap fruit: goats' flesh--the same as mutton--broth, fowls, with a little beef sometimes, and curry, but we have good wheaten bread.
‎[from Marshaman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward. Vol I, p152]‎

p. 26. "On May 11, 1785, when William was twenty-four, he and his wife took up their residence in this little town ‎(Moulton)‎ perched on the high road between Kettering and Northampton, some four miles from the latter." He worked there and taught school. He was ordained as a Baptist preacher at Moulton on 1 August 1786...."Deeming it wise to change his method of conducting his trade, Carey hired himself out to aid a shoemaker of Kettering named Thomas Gotch. Every two weeks the young preacher tramped to Gotch's place of business with the shoes which he had finished, returning home with the leather for the coming fortnight's work."....Thos. Gotch was a deacon in Andrew Fuller's church as well as a banker and a contractor to the Army and Navy for footwear. He paid William 10 shillings per week and relieved him of the necessity to make or mend shoes. It was a gift so that Wm. might have more time to study languages and to pursue his spiritual life.

p. 32. "In 1788, while on a trip to Birmingham on church business, Carey met Thomas Potts, who as a young man had been in America and had made friends among the Indians and Negroes. Potts had seen the evils of the slave trade.....At length Potts persuaded Carey to write a pamphlet on this subject to arouse Christians tot he need of assuming their missionary obligations."

He then received a call from a church at Leicester, called Harvey Lane Church, which was a problem church. Carey straightened it out over several years.

"Carey can contribute little to the stations out of his pension, after he has supported his sister Mary, his late wife's eldest sister in France, and an orphan whom he has sent home to be educated in England, the expense of whose board, education, and clothing lies wholly upon him....."

In the Autumn of 1789 the Careys moved from Moulton to Leicester, Northants., where Carey cobbled shoes and pastored the church at Harvey Lane.

1794: Catherine stayed behind to marry Mr. Short; Wm. & Dorothy with four boys travelled by small boat to Malda to join the indigo works at Mudnabatty.
"The land around Mudnabatty was flat, open country watered by the Ganges, with rice fields stretching out as far as the eye could see. Little villages wee dotted about, surrounded by mango and banyan trees...The prickly-pear was there in abundance and provided an ideal hiding place for the snakes which were not as easily avoided as the crocodiles that lay in the rivers and pools."

p. 81. "Their five-year-old Peter became ill with a fever and in spite of all their tender nursing it became obvious that he was not going to recover. He died within hours, and in their lonely grief they found that none of the nationals wanted to take any part in the burial of one of the 'unorthodox dead.' They had to attend to everything themselves."

Problems with indigo farming at Mudnabatti meant a move to Kidderpur, 12 miles further north.

Jan 10, 1800 the Careys moved to Serampore under protection of the Danish flag. Serampore was on the west bank of the Hooghly River. Calcutta was two hours away.

In the Mission were the Careys, Marshmans, Fountain, Wm. Ward, David Brunsdon ‎(died 3 July 1801)‎, Mrs. Grant and the Thomases ‎(Dr. Thomas died Oct. 1801)‎.

Marshman...undertook with the help of his wife to open boarding-schools for the children of wealthy Europeans and East Indians, one for the boys and the other for girls....Before long the schools were earning more than 1,000 lbs annually.
...Within a month the Mission opened its third school, a free one, under the instruction of a Bengali master, for Indian students.

"In 1801 the Governor General of India, Lord Wellesley, opened a new college at Fort William where young Civil Servants, sent out from England, could continue their education under supervision, and with the best possible tuition." The college was at Calcutta. "When he took up his duties he stayed in Calcutta each week from Tuesday to Friday but was able to spend every weekend back at Serampore.".."The Mission now came under the flag of the East India Company. Lord Wellesley had gained complete confidence in Carey and no longer regarded him and his colleagues as a potential danger to Bengal."

December1829 Sati abolished in Bengal.

1830 a financial crisis in Calcutta; also cost of war in Burma meant the cost-cutting exercise of abolishing professorships at Fort Wm. College.

1820 Sept. 14 formed a Horticultural and Agricultural Society ‎(patron Lord
Hastings.
1833 Elected President of the Agricultural Society of India‎

"On June 9, 1824, Carey died. At his death the flag on the Danish Government House flew at half-mast. Crowds of Hindus, Mohammedans, and Europeans lined the road to the cemetery. Joshua Marshman preached the funeral sermon of his longstanding colleague."

"The second impressive memorial is found in London's Westminster Abbey. The lectern, from which Scipture is read at all services..., is dedicated to William Carey..."

It is particularly with England, however, we are to deal. You have, perhaps, been told that a Romish monk called Augustine ‎(not the Bishop of that name, who lived much earlier)‎ converted Britain in the year 596. That is a mistake. As early as the middle of the second century the Light of the world had overcome the darkness of Druidism, and there were many British Churches established..."

"The first regularly organized Baptist Church of Englishmen on English soil was formed in London in 1612." ‎[Few archives exist because of the fear of persecution.]‎

"There were two main groups of Baptists in the 17th century--the General and the Particular. The dividing line between all Christians of that period was the question "Whether or not Christ died for all men." General Baptists proclaimed grace for all men. Particular Baptists insisted upon the personal election and final perseverance of a limited number."

About the time of Oliver Cromwell there lived two Baptist writers, John Milton ‎("Paradise Lost")‎ and Paul Bunyan ‎("Pilgrim's Progress")‎...p. 22. "Under the Five Mile Act preachers not ordained by the Church of England, if found within five miles of any market town for the purpose of preaching, were heavily punished..."the immortal dreamer' was among the first to be sent to gaol for refusing to submit to this infamous law. John Bunyan's reputation as a preacher became so great that on a day's notice three thousand people would assemble before breakfast to hear him. When he visited London, the largest building could not accommodate those who wished to hear him preach."

"The iniquity of the Slave Trade was long in coming home to the conscience of England...Abraham Booth was one of the first in England to declare that this traffic was a sin and shame. The first petition to Parliament in favour of abolition was presented by a Baptist minister."

"Dr. Robertson Nicoll, editor of the "British Weekly," considers Carey's name "perhaps the greatest in the religious history of this century." It was mainly at his instigation that the Baptist Missionary Society, the first society formed by English-speaking people for the express purpose of sending the Gospel to the heathen, came into being in 1792...Then God touched the spirit of men like Whitefield and Wesley, and Baptists like Andrew Fuller and William Carey. Fuller published an essay on "The Gospel worthy of all acceptation," in which he insisted that the invitation to trust in Jesus was not to be restricted, but was a genuine and unreserved offer to all. William Carey, great-grandfather to our own Rev. S. Pearce Carey, M.A., read Fullers' essay, and he wrote "An Inquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathen."

....With a passion for languages and with the help of borrowed book, ‎[Wm. Carey]‎ acquired in seven years facility in reading French, Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Entering the Baptist ministry William Carey preached before the Association of Nottingham in 1792. His sermon on Isaiah lIV. 2,3 set forth ‎(1)‎ that we should expect great things from God, and ‎(2)‎ that we should attempt great things for God. It made a deep impression, and on October 2, 1792, in a little room in Kettering 12 or 13 men met, and after prayer, agreed upon seven resolutions setting forth the need and the determination to carry the Gospel to heathen lands. Within eight months Carey, with Dr. Thomas, a ship surgeon with the East India Company, sailed for India. They settled in what was then the Danish colony of Serampore, where they were afterwards joined by Marshman and Ward."

‎[This is a very simplified version!]‎