|
|
Knowledge concerning this very significant migration of people of Manx stock, and of their settlement in America, has been pieced together from various sources including diaries kept by some of the emigrants, letters written to relatives on the Island by emigrants, as well as letters written by emigrants to Manx newspapers.
Dissenters are those who refused to adhere to the rites of the Established Church, e.g. Quakers, Congregationalists and from the 1830's the Methodists. Under this heading are also Roman Catholics though they would accurately claim that it was the Anglican Church that was in dissent!
The first missionary was John Taylor who arrived, from Liverpool, in September 1840. Probably a major reason was that his wife, Leonora Cannon (aunt of the famous George Cannon - q.v.), was born on the Island, though had emigrated with her employer to Canada where she encountered the somewhat younger Taylor as her Methodist class-leader; thus Taylor had a ready entrée to many Manx homes. He had spent the previous six months in Liverpool staying with George Cannon's family where he had made contact with a 'Mr Radcliffe, agent for the Bible Society' and with a 'Miss Brannan from the Isle of Man'. This later was almost certainly the extremely well known and redoubtable 'mangle woman', a Wesleyan Methodist, who had done much during the Cholera outbreaks in 1832/3 and was now a well respected figure among evangelical Christians as well as matron of Fort Street Hospital. She apparently gave John Taylor a frosty reception saying that he would only be welcome if his views were as other preachers of her acquaintance. Apparently this early indication of a cool Manx reception did not daunt him!
Multiple attendance, especially in rural areas, at both Chapel and Parish Church would appear to have been quite common and continued until much later in the century - many chapels choosing times of service so as not to clash with those of the Parish Church. The first Methodist preacher arrived in 1758. However several of the clergy, and the Governor were more friendly towards him. The only sect that could have been expected to appear was the Mormons.
The Manx mission was a small part of a much larger British mission that started in 1837 and continued until the 1850's although once polygamy was fully known and promulgated in 1852 most Mormon missioning was subject to ridicule - a much more potent weapon than doctrinal attack. Probably 1851 (the yeare of the religious census) was a high point of the Mormon church in Britain. census indicated 222 meeting places with, allowing for multiple attendance, an estimated following of some 25,000 to 30,000. By 1850 Mormon statistics indicated that some 17,000 English (presumably this included Scots, Welsh and Manx) converts had already sailed.
The Utah Encyclopaedia reports that in 1870 some 24% of Utah (then virtually entirely Mormon) were of British birth, which allowing for their American born children probably meant that around 50% of the population were of immediate British descent. It was in September 1840 that the first missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints arrived on the Isle of Man. After the 1840s and 1850's a dwindling handful of members survived to the beginning of the 20th Century. Of the non-British, most were Scandinavian - products of a very successful mission in the early 1850's.
Members would be found on the Isle of Man until at least 1900. What is interesting from the maps provided by Day is to see how the Mormon strength was in counties, with the exception of the West Riding, adjacent to, but not overlapping areas of strong Primitive Methodism which also appealed most strongly to the poor. 20th Century imports of largely American based churches, for example Mormons and Pentecostals, are totally ignored though a few Manx have played important roles in the Mormon church.
