Mitt Romney's Mormon roots in northern England

It's well-known that Republican contender for the US presidency Mitt Romney is a Mormon - but not that his family was converted in England. He doesn't mention it on the campaign trail, but his great-great-grandfather, a Preston carpenter, became one of the first British Mormons, 175 years ago.

"This is the spot - this is where it all started," says historian Aidan Turner-Bishop pointing down to a small, unmarked and unprepossessing, shingle beach.
The sun is just starting to set over the banks of the River Ribble in Preston. The birds are singing gently. It is an idyllic scene.
"On a hot summer's day, this is where the kids come to play," says Turner-Bishop.
This is the site where the very first Mormon baptisms outside North America took place.
And it is almost certainly the spot where the Romney family were baptised into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in the late 1830s, at the start of a wave of 19th Century Mormon conversions in England.
"In order to compete to be the first people to be baptised, some of the men began to run, to race each other, down to the little beach… People were just carried away by the sheer excitement of it," says Turner-Bishop.

"There would be crowds on top of the bridge and crowds around here. It was a big event. And they'd stand and watch these exciting, unusual American evangelists baptise people in full immersion in the waters of the river."
The church, founded in the US in 1830 by Joseph Smith, faced intense persecution in its early years, so it was a bold move, when - just seven years later - it sent missionaries across the Atlantic Ocean.