King Tree

Dear Mr Gliddon,
May I take up again the genealogical conversation that we began on Debbie's Graduation Day?

The distant connection of yours with whom I have been in correspondence is Mr Cecil Beer, an elderly Cornishman who has now lived in Australia for some years.

His grandparents were Henry Beer and his wife Ellen (Blin). It was because her Blin sister married a Stoyle namesake of mine that somebody put him in touch with me; I happened to have a record of Henry and Ellen's marriage in 1862 and some details of Ellen+s parents and grandparents; and that is how Mr Beer came to ask me to find out more on the Beer side. He started with the information that Henry Beer had been born in 1834 in Barnstaple, the son or grandson of a Charles Beer born in 1770; that he was apprenticed to John Gliddon, printer and bookbinder of Williton, with the consent of his mother Susan Fry and father-in-law William Fry; that the Gliddons had given him cutlery as a wedding present; that there exists a later affectionate letter to Henry from his aunt, C.Gliddon, at a ?Cofton House; and that Mr Beer+s brother recalled being taken by their father to visit some of the Somerset Gliddons in the West Country in the early 1920s. A Phebe and a John (Gliddon?) were mentioned in the letter, too. Mr Beer's assumption was that the Gliddons were quite close relatives, Henry hence having been apprenticed to one of them, but how the relationship had come about was unclear. Which is where I started.

I need not give you a blow-by-blow account of what I have done. The main findings, though, are that Henry's father Charles Beer (age and parents still unknown) died at some time between 1834 and his widow's remarriage in 1843 at St Peter Barnstaple, to William Fry, butcher.
The marriage certificate confirmed what already seemed likely, that Susan Beer/Fry was a Gliddon: she was the Susannah Gliddon baptised at St Peter in 1808, the daughter of John Gliddon, innkeeper, and his wife Elizabeth. There is now further evidence of this from the Census of 1841, which has Susan Beer, aged about 30 and described as a milliner, and her two children, Henry and Elizabeth, living with John Gliddon, innkeeper, and his wife, as well as Margaret and Mary G, presumably Susan's sisters. This was in Joy Street, in which White's Directory of 1850 recorded Mrs E. Gliddon as landlady of -The Falcon'. That in turn implies that John, the father, died between 1841 and 1850.

So there is no doubt that Henry Beer's mother was from an inn-keeping Gliddon family of Barnstaple , which slightly surprised Mr Deer, who had only heard of his forbears as teetotal Wesleyan Methodists and only knew of the Gliddons as a Somerset family at Williton.

Since there are no Somerset records in Exeter it was not possible to look for the Williton Gliddons in registers, census returns and most other likely places. However , I was able to send Mr Beer copies of two wills which threw quite a lot of light on relationships. The first was that of John Wesley Gliddon, who died in 1880, of Priest House, Williton. This referred to his wife Ellen Mary, his sons Horace John and Ernest Edward, his brothers Henry and Benjamin and his sister Phebe. He was clearly a comparatively young man, and this was confirmed in the will of his father, John Gliddon, in the following year, 1881. Here there are references to Henry, Benjamin and Phebe again, to grandson Horrace John again and to another grandson, Arthur Henry G. John's will also identifies "C" beyond doubt as his widow, Christiana, and the address in the letter as Capton House, at Stogumber.

For Mr Deer many things were now a lot clearer. What remains uncertain is how and when John snr was translated from a printer to an ironmonger, and of course, above all, how this John Gliddon and Susan Gliddon were related. Were they in fact brother and sister, for John and Elizabeth G did have a son John, baptised at Barnstaple St. Peter in 1810? And was John snr the first Wesleyan: naming his own son after the founder? (The Beers were Wesleyans, too, Henry and his sister being baptised in the chapel at Barnstaple, I found.)

My hope is that after my magnificent stroke of luck in meet.ing you you may be able to fill out further details that I can pass on to Mr Beer, who would like nothing better than to see what you know of the Gliddon family tree and who would, I am sure, be delighted if he could have a copy of the history you mentioned of the family firm, I too would be greatly interested to know how you and Debbie are connected with these Gliddons I have been learning and reading about! The present Gliddon ironmongers at Sidmouth must fit in too somewhere: I know there was a Frederick Marwood G there who was the executor for Caroline G, widow, in 1899 (whom I once wrongly took to be the mysterious -C").
about Pancrasweek?

he I look forward to whatever you may be kind enough to tell me about the names and dates and lives of the members of your family I am also consumed with envy of Debbie, with life in Spain awaitinq her. Tell her to spare a thought For me a s she's enjoying cafes and sun and so on, say, in February! The hard thing will be to get her to come back again!

Yours sincerely,