Among the very first
Robert Wilson was born in Overton in 1819, and in 1840 was living in Cloy, which consisted of just a few dwellings: most there now have been rebuilt since the 1840s. He and his brother Richard were baptised 18 October by Henry Royle and were therefore among the very first converts in North Wales. He emigrated to America in 1841, although he didn’t arrive in the Salt Lake Valley until 1849.
In 1856, along with Henry Woolley and many others, he participated in the rescue of two handcart companies which were stranded due to early snowstorms in Wyoming, almost 200 miles from Salt Lake City.
He eventually settled in Oakley, Idaho, where he died in 1895. Robert’s father William Price Wilson was a master builder and helped to build Overton Bridge, to the northwest of Overton, and where the early baptisms may well have taken place.
The Wilson brothers stand at the very beginning of this archive’s story. Henry Royle and Frederick Cooke were the first missionaries called to Wales in 1840, and the baptisms at Cloy that October are the earliest recorded here. Nine years later the Hartley sailed with the first Welsh families; Robert Wilson had already been in America for eight of them. See 1840 in the timeline →
The baptism date of 18 October 1840 is firm and is corroborated by the mission record of Henry Royle’s first baptisms. The eight-year gap between emigrating in 1841 and reaching the valley in 1849 is not yet explained by the record, and his ship and overland company are unidentified. His part in the 1856 rescue should be confirmed against the relief-company rosters; the rescue itself is well documented, and the stranded companies were the Willie and Martin handcart companies. That Overton Bridge was the site of the early baptisms is offered as a possibility by the source, not as a fact.