DEARMAN & MOLLETT

The rather beautiful portrait above is of the real man.  I do not know who drew it, and I have temporarily forgotten who was the wonderful lost relative who sent it to me.  Sincere apologies - I shall dredge through my files to find out and make the proper acknowledgement.

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He looks kindly does he not?  And I think he was.

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Robert was a pastry cook, born to poor parents in Norwich.  Well there is still a slight bit of doubt about his parentage which I shall come to, in his story, but it does not affect the Mollett line as the two contenders as father are cousins and therefore his great-grandfather would have been the same man, whichever Robert was his father.

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For most of his working life he had a shop on Skinner Street in London's Holborn district and he must have prospered because by the time he died he was calling himself a gentleman.  And indeed he did seem to have various investments.

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He was married twice for his first wife, Elizabeth Foster died, I think either in childbirth or from complications arising from childbirth, although records of her burial are lost.  A few years later he married a much younger lady who took on his small family of three boys and gave him three more sons and two daughters, although sadly all three of these sons died before he did.  She must have been a loving woman for her stepson John, my great great grandfather named one of his children after her.

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I now believe that this was the man responsible for the modest prosperity of my part of the Mollett family until my grandfather's time.  Other branches did better.  A really interesting man.