Summary of the Thomas Chamberlain Family History
The earliest known ancestor of Thomas was Henry Chamberlayne, born 1709 and Christened in Lambourne, Berkshire, England. He married Elizabeth on 13 Nov 1740 in Speen, Berkshire, England. They had a son, Joseph Chamberlayne, Christened 1751 in Hungerford.
Joseph married Martha Birch at Wickham in 1781. Son, Stephen was born to them at Leckenhampstead, Chieveley in 1793.
Stephen married Jemima Brooks, the daughter of John and Sarah Brooks on 09 Jun 1839 in Welford. Their son, Thomas, was born 1821 at Winterbourne.
Thomas married Hannah Wale, the daughter of Thomas Whale and Harriet Cook, in 1844 at Winterbourne. By 1847 they had lost two children who had lived but a few months. Within this period they had converted to the Mormon Church as had Hannah’s parents and brother, George. The family heeded the call from their Church leaders to gather in America, at Zion in the newly settled Utah Territory (Deseret). It is here where the Church had migrated after facing further threats and persecutions in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Thomas and Hannah sailed first from England to America in the fall of 1848 and traveled by steamer to Alton, Illinois, a river town at the shores of the Mississippi and the confluence of Illinois and Missouri rivers. Hannah’s parents and daughter-in-law (George had died en route) joined them in Alton and they traveled together in the spring of 1850 to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the Mormon trail began. They left for Salt Lake in 1852 and arrived in September, camping two days at the Jordan River before being called to an area 30 miles west of the city in the settlement of Tooele.
On July 14, 1854 Thomas and Hannah had a son they named Thomas. By the end of 1857 Hannah would lose her parents and husband to illness. In 1858 Hannah was married to John Gillespie by Brigham Young, in his Salt Lake City office. John was called in 1868 to the ‘Muddy Mission’, in what would be called St. Thomas, located in Clarke County, Nevada. His family accompanied him and they lived here until the town of 500 residents was abandoned because of a land dispute with the State of Nevada in 1871. At this time John went back to Tooele and Hannah and Thomas settled in Long Valley (present day Glendale, Orderville, and Mount Carmel). Thomas would later be an instrumental leader in the establishment of the United Order in Orderville.
It was here that Thomas was married to Chastie Ellen Convington in 1883. They had a daughter Reta Ellen who was born in 1899. Reta Married Edward Giles Carroll in 1918.
Hunt Homestead 