John Walsingham Cooke Meredith - Marriage

Marriage

On July 3, 1831, a couple of months after his unpleasant appearance at the Old Bailey, Meredith sailed back to Dublin. Two weeks later (July 16), one of their children recorded that 'my father and mother sailed for Liverpool' from Dublin, but this seems unlikely as they were not yet married and Sarah would only have been twelve or thirteen years old. Liverpool then being a popular port for those choosing to emigrate to North America, it is possible that Meredith sailed to Canada from there, but his biographers state the year of his arrival to be 1834.

His wife's family, the Peglers, came to Canada separately from Meredith and farmed across the river from him in Westminster Township, Ontario. On December 1, 1835, one year after what is generally supposed to be his arrival in Canada, John Meredith married Sarah Pegler (1819–1900), a few months after she had turned sixteen.

Sarah was the daughter of Anthony Pegler (1792–1871) and Temperence Harris (1792–1873). Both her parents lived at King's Stanley, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, where the Pegler name has been found in great numbers since at least the mid sixteenth century. Her father was a farmer and butcher, and it is presumed that he was also the same Anthony Pegler of King's Stanley found in the Gloucestershire gaol register who was one of four Peglers sentenced together in 1830, though the only one not to be deported to Australia. Going by the Gloucestershire Public Records, it would seem that both Sarah's parents died in England, rather than in Canada. The Anthony Pegler with whom she lived in Canada is thought to have been Sarah's elder brother, and it is most likely that he emigrated there taking Sarah with him after their father was placed in gaol in 1830. On a visit to his cousin in 1861, the diarist Edmund Allen Meredith recorded,

Bye the bye I should say that I formed a more favourable idea than I had before done of my cousin-in-law Mrs Meredith and of her eldest daughter - Mrs M., although not elegant appears sensible and a woman of some character. Annie also seems an amiable girl. Isabel was, I was told, enjoying herself very much in Ireland, and Uncle John had quite recovered from the effects of the over physicking he went through at London (England)