The William Webb Wagg Investigation (8)
Part 8 – Mileham: where the cholera epidemic touched the Broughton family
Part 7 explored the Norfolk landscape in which the Wegg family lived — the villages, fields, and parishes that formed the physical framework of their lives. But as the DNA evidence began to connect descendants across these same places, it became clear that the parish registers held more than names and dates. They preserved moments when the ordinary continuity of family life was abruptly broken. While researching a DNA match descended from the Broughton family, I was drawn back into the Mileham parish records, where a sequence of burials in January 1849 revealed the devastating impact of cholera on a household closely connected to William Webb Wagg’s own family.
Mileham was not an isolated parish, but part of the same closely connected Norfolk landscape in which the Wegg and Broughton families had lived for generations. Situated approximately five miles south-west of Plumstead, Mileham lay within easy travelling distance of the neighbouring parishes that had already appeared repeatedly in the family record. Plumstead itself held particular significance: it was there that Robert Broughton and Ann King, the grandparents of William Wegg — father of William Webb Wagg — and of his first cousin Mary Broughton, had married, lived, and died. Mileham therefore formed part of the same geographic and family sphere — a place where their grandchildren established their own households while remaining firmly within the same network of kinship and community. In rural Norfolk, such movement represented continuity rather than departure, reflecting the normal pattern of family life across neighbouring parishes.
One of the unexpected consequences of working with DNA matches is that it draws your attention to branches of the family that you might otherwise never have examined closely. A match appears in the list — perhaps a descendant of a distant cousin — and as you begin to reconstruct their line, the wider family context gradually comes into view.
In this case, the path began with a DNA match descended from Ellen Sadler, born in Mileham, Norfolk, in January 1846. Ellen survived into adulthood, later marrying John William Murfitt and moving to London. Her descendants, generations later, carry fragments of DNA inherited from the Broughton family. It was through tracing Ellen’s line that the Mileham parish records opened a window onto a far more sombre chapter within the same extended family network from which William Webb Wagg descended.
Ellen’s mother, Mary Broughton, was born on 27 December 1808 at Thurgarton, Norfolk. She married Jonathan Sadler on 14 November 1831 at Plumstead and settled in the nearby agricultural parish of Mileham. Mary was not a distant figure in the wider reconstruction of the Wegg family. She was the first cousin of William Wegg, the father of William Webb Wagg. Their shared grandparents, Robert Broughton and Ann King, placed both families firmly within the same kinship network that extended across the neighbouring north Norfolk parishes of Plumstead, Baconsthorpe, and Mileham.
Mary and John established their household in Mileham, where they raised a large family. But the parish registers reveal that their lives were marked by repeated loss, even before the events of 1849.
- Their son William Sadler, born about 1832, died in infancy.
- Savory Sadler, born in 1843, died in August 1846, aged three,
- Her older brother Samuel Dennis Sadler, born in 1841, died just days later, aged five.
- Sarah Ann Sadler, born in 1844, died aged two.
These deaths reflect the vulnerability of childhood in mid-nineteenth-century rural Norfolk, where infectious disease, limited medical care, and economic insecurity made early mortality a common reality even in ordinary times.
The cholera epidemic reaches Mileham
In the winter of 1848–1849, cholera reached Norfolk as part of a global pandemic that spread from India across Europe and into Britain. Cholera was a waterborne disease that caused rapid and severe dehydration, often killing within hours or days. In the mid-nineteenth century, before the causes of infection were understood and before effective treatment existed, its arrival in a parish could bring sudden and devastating loss. Over 52,000 people died in England and Wales during this outbreak alone. The disease spread primarily through contaminated water supplies, though this was not yet recognised at the time. Once established in a community, cholera could move with alarming speed, sometimes claiming lives within a single day.
Norfolk was directly affected. Parish registers across the county record clusters of deaths attributed to cholera. In Mileham, the burial register of St John the Baptist Church records nineteen burials from cholera between 27 December 1848 and 31 January 1849. [1] This surge stands in stark contrast to the normal pattern of mortality within the parish. In the twelve months leading up to the first cholera burial on 27 December 1848, only eight burials had been recorded. In the remainder of 1849, after the epidemic had passed, a further eleven burials were recorded. The sudden appearance of nineteen deaths within just over four weeks therefore represented an extraordinary break in the ordinary rhythm of parish life, reflecting the devastating and concentrated impact of the epidemic on this small rural community.
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At the time of the epidemic, Mileham was home to just over 400 people. The burial of nineteen parishioners within a single month therefore represented a devastating loss for such a small community, affecting families who lived and worked within a closely connected rural parish.
Among those buried were Mary Sadler and four of her children.
Their deaths occurred in devastating succession:
John Joseph Sadler, infant — buried 24 January 1849
Jemima Sadler, aged 9 — buried 24 January 1849
Mary Sadler, aged 40 — buried 25 January 1849
Robert Sadler, aged 4 — buried 27 January 1849
Elizabeth Sadler, aged 9, twin to Jemima — buried 29 January 1849
The surname appears in the register in both forms, Sadler and Saddler, reflecting the fluid spelling of the period. The nineteen burials are recorded across three consecutive pages, each marked in the margin with a note identifying the cause affecting the parish at that time: Cholera. Its presence beside these pages distinguishes this sequence from the ordinary pattern of parish mortality, signalling a concentrated outbreak that disrupted the familiar rhythm of life within this small rural community.
The sequence of burials illustrates with stark clarity the speed with which the disease moved through the household. Within six days, a mother and four of her children were dead.
Living through the COVID pandemic has given modern readers some understanding of how epidemic disease can abruptly interrupt the continuity of family life. Yet in 1849, families such as the Sadlers faced cholera without the protections of modern medicine, sanitation, or scientific understanding. There were no effective treatments, and little could be done once the disease took hold. The parish register preserves this sequence with quiet precision, recording not only individual deaths but the passage of a global epidemic through a single household.
Mileham and its church: the place where they were buried
Mileham was a small agricultural parish situated in the gently rolling chalk farmland of central Norfolk, between East Dereham and Fakenham. Its population was modest, and most residents lived as agricultural labourers, craftsmen, or small farmers. The parish church of St John the Baptist, built of flint and dating back to the medieval period, stood at the centre of village life.
The churchyard surrounding it had served for centuries as the burial ground of the parish. It was here, within the same ground that held generations of their neighbours and kin, that Mary Sadler and her children were laid to rest in January 1849.
The rector who performed the burials, Charles B. Barnwell, would almost certainly have known many of those he laid to rest. In a parish of Mileham’s size, these deaths were not abstract statistics but personal losses, affecting families bound together by kinship, work, and daily familiarity. The nineteen burials recorded during those weeks would have been felt across the entire community, marking a period of shared grief within this small and closely connected parish.
The wider epidemic in Norfolk and Norwich
The outbreak in Mileham formed part of the wider cholera epidemic that swept through Norfolk in 1848 and 1849. The disease affected both rural villages and urban centres. In Norwich, where members of the Wegg family were living and working at the time, conditions were particularly favourable for its spread. Norwich was a major textile city, with dense working-class housing, limited sanitation infrastructure, and shared water sources.
Textile workers, labourers, and poorer families were especially vulnerable. Although there is no evidence that cholera directly claimed members of William Webb Wagg’s immediate household, the epidemic formed part of the wider environment in which his family lived, shaping the conditions and uncertainties of everyday life.
The impact of cholera was so severe that it contributed directly to the passage of the Public Health Act of 1848, which marked the beginning of systematic improvements in sanitation and public health across Britain. For families such as the Sadlers and the Broughtons, however, these reforms came too late.
Unlike Britain, where cholera epidemics repeatedly devastated communities, Australia was largely spared. Strict quarantine measures and geographic isolation prevented the disease from becoming established in the colonies. By the time William Webb Wagg was transported and later established his family there, they had entered a different epidemiological world — one in which the epidemic disease that had claimed the lives of their relatives in Norfolk no longer posed the same immediate threat.
A family tragedy within the Wegg–Broughton kinship network
Mary Sadler’s death was not an isolated event in an unrelated family. She was the first cousin of William Wegg, William Webb Wagg’s father. Her children were part of the same extended kinship network from which William Webb Wagg descended.
Amid this loss, a small number of Mary’s children survived.
Emily Sadler, born in 1830, lived into adulthood and married Samuel Wright.
Hannah Sadler, born in 1837, later married Auguste Eugene Lefort and lived until 1903.
Ellen Sadler, born in 1846, whose descendants provided the DNA match that helped illuminate this story, survived the epidemic but died young in London in 1870.
Others remain more difficult to trace fully. Jonathan James Sadler, baptised in 1833, disappears from the record after childhood. Their father, Jonathan Sadler, appears in the 1851 census, but his later life remains only partially visible.
What DNA helped bring into view
Without DNA evidence, the Sadler family might have remained a peripheral branch, noted only briefly in parish registers. Instead, a match descended from Ellen Sadler provided the starting point for reconstructing this line. That genetic connection confirmed the documentary evidence linking the Sadlers and the Broughtons, and placed their story firmly within the same extended family network as William Webb Wagg.
What emerges is not simply a genealogical connection, but a deeper understanding of the historical realities faced by the family.
The parish register of Mileham preserves the record of a household struck down by one of the most feared diseases of the nineteenth century. The deaths of Mary Sadler and her children stand as part of the wider impact of the cholera epidemic that swept through Norfolk in 1849, leaving its mark not only on individual families but on the communities in which they lived.
Their story forms part of the same Norfolk landscape from which the Wegg family emerged — a reminder that behind every reconstructed lineage lies not only continuity, but loss, survival, and lives shaped by the forces of their time.
This was not the path I had originally intended to follow. It emerged through the DNA evidence, drawing attention to a family whose lives were closely intertwined with those of William Webb Wagg’s own kin. These moments of divergence are part of the process of reconstruction. They deepen our understanding of the world in which our ancestors lived, even as they briefly lead us away from the central line. We now return to that line, and to the Clark family, whose connection to the Weggs forms the next stage of the investigation.
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[1] St John the Baptist, Mileham, Norfolk, parish burial register, 1848–1849 (Norfolk Record Office, PD 378/7), viewed via Ancestry.com, Norfolk, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813–1995.
