Fun chasing non-relatives

[Lesley Robertson]

As a result of a "work swap" deal with a group who are going to help identify the boxes of obscure microscope parts in the museum I manage in return for help with their english language website, I have been chasing assorted microscope makers around the 18th and 19th centuries. This week's main target, has proved quite interesting. I have turned up some databases that might be usful, so I'm including them.

For a start, back in the good old days, virtually everyone who made or sold microscopes (and any other optics) called himself an optician but Andrew didn't. Even in the 1851 Great Exhibition catalogue (see Grace's Guide, below), he called himself "inventor and manufacturer". In the census, he listed himself as "gentleman (1841)" and then "landowner"in the later ones, adding "farmer" to "landowner" in one entry. Fortunately, there's a wonderful database called "Webster's Signature Database" HERE which gives info about pretty much any maker's initials or name found on scientific instruments. There's also Grace's Guide (a registered charity) to British industrial history HERE which gave me a good start.

To cut a 2-day story to a reasonable length, Andrew turned out to be a gentleman inventor (left pots of money when he died) who had patents on and sold microscopes and lenses for a few years. He was the first to successfully make a microscope lens from a diamond - the first clue that he was not short of money. He was a descendant of Oliver Cromwell via his mother's side. Most relevant sites mention that he was initially apprenticed to his Uncle Cornelius, a well-known painter, which puzzled me a lot until I found out that Cornelius the painter and Cornelius the famous microscope inventor were the same man. BTW Cornelius eventually married (quite late in life) Andrew's sister in law.

Ancestry, FMP, FreeBMD and FamilySearch were all useful, as were the British Newspaper Archive and Leicester's Commercial Directory database, but their URLs are well-known here.

To add cream to the cake, the Internet Archive HERE has copies for free download of most of Andrew's books which, to anyone interested in the early days of microscopy, are fascinating and beautiful.

The morals of this tale:
Read everything you find, even if the summary on the search engine doesn't look promising (eg some of the auction and museum sites include odd bits of biography in descriptions of various items).
Don't discard strange results (eg looking for an optician, found a landowner) until you've checked them, but also don't use them until you've checked them (eg the tilemaker brothers with the correct names are NOT related)...

And on to the next one......

[Lesley Robertson]

This search for historical microscope makers has taken me into some unusual (for me) places.
As someone without English ancestors, I have been quite surprised as the availability of 18th century records for the London and Middlesex area, as well as how many of them alive in any time period were either relatives or apprenticed to the others. I'm still confused as to how someone apprenticed into the Fishmongers Company set up as an optician after completing his time, though...

However, today I felt that I had to turn my raincoat collar up and pull my hat low down over my dark glasses to visit a forum I had not imagined myself visiting... On the probate entry for William (but not on any census entry) he is described as "gunsmith and optician"! Having done all the usual searches - BMDs, parish records and census, etc, I still had the same hole in his story that previous searchers got stuck with (he always appears out of the blue in 1837 when he opened his well-known shop), a Google search took me to the Internet Gun Club .
There he was - all the early years AND their detail about the later years agrees with what I'd found. Even the logos on the guns were the same as those on their optical products! I printed it off and ran for it before they noticed me.

I'm almost disappointed that there's only 3 more firms on the list!