Harriet Wetherill (1801-1859) and Thomas Lound (1801-1861).
My 5th great-grand aunt and uncle.
Harriet was born on 11 June 1801 and baptised on the 16th at St Nicholas’s Church in Great Yarmouth. Her parents were James Wetherill and Mary Proctor. She grew up in the coastal town without knowing her father, who’d died just weeks before her birth.
She next crops up in the county town of Norwich, where she married Thomas Lound on 25 December 1821 at St Simon and St Jude Church. This stands at the bottom of quaint Elm Hill but was declared redundant in 1892. Thomas was from Sprowston, Norfolk, where he was baptised on 9 August 1801 to parents Thomas and Mary. Thomas was successful in life, working for a local brewery as a manager and clerk and also, as shown in the 1851 census, as a fire insurance agent. However, it was as a talented amateur artist and photographer that he made his name. He helped organise art exhibitions locally and was a leading figure in the local art establishment. He is thought to have studied under the English marine and landscape artist John Sell Cotman and worked mainly in watercolours.
Thomas was a member of the Norwich Society of Artists and exhibited with them for some years. He was also involved in the establishment of the Norwich School of Design, which is now the Norwich University of the Arts, in the 1840s. At around this time he began exhibiting in London and a number of his works were shown at the Royal Academy. Most of his pictures were of Norfolk landscapes and beach scenes but he also painted in Yorkshire, Wales and the Lake District. Perhaps he took Harriet with him on his journeys around the country. As an enthusiastic amateur photographer and member of the Norwich Photographic Society, he exhibited a number of photos of Norfolk scenes.
Harriet and Thomas lived in King Street, Norwich, for many years. Harriet died in 1859 and Thomas followed from apoplexy on 18 January 1861. The Norwich Mercury of 23 January, reporting his death, noted his talents and also called out his abilities as a sketcher of important city buildings. They noted that he had been ill for some time and that the recent death of his wife and a son had “produced considerable constitutional tendency to the inroads of disease”. He left his effects, valued at below £3,000, to his surviving daughters.
A notice in the local newspapers a few weeks after his death advertised an auction of his belongings, including furniture, watercolours, oils, drawings, camera equipment and books. The auction catalogue stated that Thomas’s “attractive social qualities procured him a widely extended circle of friends; whilst his indefatigable and eminently successful application to art – in which a correct knowledge of chiaro-oscura, and perfect truthfulness to nature in colour, united with innate genius, were especially remarkable – earned for him a celebrity that many professional men might have good reason to envy.”
The couple had a number of children, who were baptised at St Etheldreda Church in Norwich.
- Matilda Lound (1827-1907) was baptised in Norwich and married commercial traveller Edward Thirkettle there in 1859. They raised their family in Hackney and Dalston in London and census returns show they were comfortable enough to have a domestic servant. At some point Edward became a clerk in the hops trade. The 1901 census recorded them in Woodford, Essex, with Edward working as a mercantile clerk. Edward died in 1904 and was buried in Eaton, now a suburb of Norwich. Matilda ended her days there and died in 1907.
- Ellen Lound (1833-????) was baptised in Norwich and lived with her sister Harriet in London for some time, close to their other sister Matilda. She was the matron of St Philip’s Orphanage in Ladywood, Birmingham, according to the 1871 census but I’ve not found her after this.
- Harriet Wetherill Lound (1836-1905) was baptised in Norwich and was recorded in various records living or staying with her sister Ellen as an adult. She married Norfolk-born widower Francis James Banham in Hackney in 1890 but moved to live with him in Norwich. He was a grocer who had done reasonably well in business at Haymarket Corner in the city, before selling his business in 1884 (Norfolk Chronicle 12 July 1884), and they lived together in a handsome villa at 4 Newmarket Road. He died in 1904, Harriet in 1905.
- Thomas Wetherill Lound (1837-1838) was baptised and buried in Norwich.
- Henry Edwin Lound (1839-1860) was baptised in Norwich and sent to school in Kings Lynn, Norfolk. The Norwich Mercury of 25 April 1860 reported his death from consumption (TB).
Sources: BMDs, census and other info at Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com. Records at Norfolk Family History Society. British Newspaper Archive (titles in text). Websites linked to in the text. The Dictionary of National Biography.