IN May 2024 Erin Binney, an American of Cornish decent, contacted Liskeard & District Museum for information on Zacharias Williams, to whom one of her ancestors was apprenticed at the Liskeard Iron Works, Moorswater, in 1865.

In 1851 William Binney, Erin’s great, great, grandfather, was aged four and living above his father’s Bakery at 1 Church Street North. Also at home were his mother, four brothers and three sisters. On January 1, 1862, William and his father signed an indenture which started a three years and five months apprenticeship, during which William would learn the art of an Iron and Brass Founder from Zacharias Williams. His pay was 5s 6d in year one, rising to 8s 6d in the last few months. However, William agreed ‘not to commit fornication nor contract matrimony’ and ‘not to play at cards or dice tables nor haunt taverns or playhouses’ during those years. At the end of the apprenticeship, on June 1, 1865, Zacharias added an addendum to the indenture ‘I hereby certify that William Binney, the party named on the other side of this indenture has duly fulfilled his contract and I am pleased to state he is an honest, steady and an industrious workman’.

In 1869 William Binney emigrated to America, followed very soon after by Selina Fry from Bridgwater in Somerset, with her three-months-old baby named Beatrice. They had sailed on the ‘Isaac Webb’ and landed in New York on September 16, 1869. William and Selina are thought to have been acquainted in England as they were married in New York soon after their arrival. William (24 and a moulder) Selina (23) and Beatrice (1) are all listed in the 1870 census for the Brooklyn Ward of Kings, in New York City.

In response to her original enquiry, Erin was pleased to purchase several copies of my book ‘A Peek into Liskeard’s Past’, in which her relations in American are now able to read an account of the life and works of Zacharias Williams.