DEARMAN & MOLLETT

The portrait above is by Ary Scheffer (1795-1858), a Dutch artist and is entitled Reynolds the Engraver.  I don’t think it is anyone famous.  I chose it partly because engraving was one of our Joseph’s chosen professions and also because in many ways the face matches my imaginings of the man.  I see I think of him as old - which is partly because of the story of his two families.  Although we have some references to him in the Beckwith family bible - images of which I have been given, by Dawn Sorenson (with thanks), we do not, of course have any pictures.  

He has a lot of children as you can see from the list at right, but not all from the same mother.  The second half of the list virtually all have the surname or middle name Bartholomew, because he didn’t marry their mother, Ann Bartholomew until after the last one was born.  Moreover the first one was born well before his first wife died.  But more of that on the pages of his story. Suffice to say the Bartholomew Beckwiths are not mentioned in the family bible.

I say that he was an engraver, for that is what he most often describes himself as in the census records, but he was also a silversmith, so maybe he did his engraving on silver, rather than on a medium which would eventually produce a print.  Again I am indebted to another Beckwith ‘relative’, Priscilla Henderson for her researches into Joseph’s work.

But he also had a secondary career as a coffee house keeper - at a time when coffee houses were all the rage in London with many of them forming the basis of institutions such as the Baltic Exchange and Lloyds of London.  No doubt Joseph’s establishments were much more modest, but we have reason to believe that he was certainly involved in the intellectual life of London at the time.

And here’s a mind-boggling thought.  Joseph was born in 1776.  His youngest son died in 1939!  So here's the story of one our most fascinating ancestors.  Well I think so anyway.