the Pearce family of St Austell, Cornwall

2007:
I am sitting here surrounded by 10000 words of the Pearce tree –which didn't even exist a week ago. I cleverly decided to follow up on a lead given in Rev'd Thomas Martin's book 'The Stranger at Home' – his volume of poetry which he wrote in about 1824. There was a reference to Mr E Pearce of Merthyn and I just thought I would see if I could identify him as Merthyn sounded a pretty small place. Eventually I found his will and this led me to a whole new cast of characters. The first tide left just a few assorted shells of rudimentary relatives – the family of Thomas Pearce and Susanna Stacey. They had dwindled in quantity to hardly any and failed to rouse a huge amount of curiosity in me. The next tide bore dozens and dozens of tregaski and beales, who pretty much all washed up on Par Sands and who failed to benefit from the ongoing evolution process. Then came a deluge of cats dogs and rainbow frogs, when my wishes came true and a very odd 'through-the-looking-glass' form of relative emerged, Grace Bartlett and her cousin Grace Herrmann.
The Tregaskes rebuilt the Waterwitch at Par. I levered out the rest of the tale – out it came tumbling tumbling. Grace was the miller's wife at Knackers Knowle and the tale of her two daughters was soon found. Widowed by 30 they married (and were widowed again), producing in total nine children each. [I now find Grace's son wrote a history of Tywardreath and was grandfather of the third Mrs Colin Graham Botha of South Africa.]
A handful of my 200 new relatives made exchanges increasing their status upwards; others, too many others, retreated backwards into obscurity, or more bluntly, the Workhouse. Stand up Dr Ewbank Lansdown in the first category, while his cousin stole food to survive escaping to the United States. Both of these descend from Grace Bartlett, to whose daughters fortune led me.
With amusement I see the hordes of Tregaski and others flocking around the still-warm body of Samuel Moss, Par's childless millionaire businessman: we have Thomas Moss Tregaskes, Benjamin Moss Tregaskes, Annie Moss Luke, Elizabeth Moss Luke of whom the last two of these end up sharing in his #20,000 fortune.

Table of Contents

bullet  Family Chart for John PEARCE
bullet  Surname List
bullet  Index of Names

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