16 Nov 2024
A journey of more than 3,000 miles and across 184 years brought a retired Canadian businessman to a memorial honouring his Victorian ancestor.
R Peter Weedon travelled all the way from Orillia, near Lake Couchiching in Ontario, to pay a personal visit to a bench remembering his four times great-grandfather Joseph Weedon, a cordwainer who lived in St Albans from 1756-1840.
He had paid for the bench to be installed in 2021 at ‘The Brickie’ – the green space off New England Street – to commemorate the place where he is said to have died, but had never seen it in person until now.
Peter’s quest to discover his family history began in the mid-1980s following the early death of his father at the age of 58.
“I realised I had never asked him about his family history, and so I said with a little part of my legacy, I would invest in a professional genealogist, and I’ve never stopped digging into the Weedon family tree.”
He has since gone back to a James Weedon born around 1650, documented with birth and death records, and information about his will, but Joseph was the oldest relative who was originally discovered.
“At that time Joseph was the only person that I could link categorically to a place. He died when he was 84 years old, and the person who found him or reported his death was his granddaughter, Mary Slough, who was 14.
“Evidently this was the site of a pub which used to be called The Brickie, and the suspicion was that he was hoisting a couple and fell over and died. He lived on Catherine Street, the fourth house in on the south side, at the intersection with the main street.”
We could not find any records of a pub on the site of the old brickworks, which were definitely not operational by the end of the 19th century when the land was recreational space, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one there at the time of Joseph’s death.
Peter revealed more about his ancestor: “He was a cordwainer and practiced his profession here, and had a son also called Joseph, who ended up moving to Camden Town, who was also a cordwainer.
“A cordwainer is not a shoe repair guy. It’s a man who fashions boots out of leather and that craft was something you could practice in your front room.
You didn’t need a lot of equipment, perhaps something to hold the leathers on, so presumably, he made a living in his front room.
“Joseph had four children who were christened in St Albans Abbey in 1795, and two of them died. He had a brother named Thomas who I think was buried at St Peter’s Church.”
Peter had tried to find Thomas’ grave on his last visit to St Albans some 30 years previous, but the then-vicar of St Peter’s told him they had no records available to look through. With family history now such a big industry, he was hopeful that the situation has now changed.
Unfortunately he could not find a headstone, and could only confirm the burial dates for John Weedon (the son of Joseph and his wife Juliet) on August 30 1803, Ann Weedon, 70, on September 2 1810, Thomas Weedon aged 77 on March 3 1828, and Joseph Weedon himself.
The Weedons moved to Canada in the 1930s, but Peter has a British passport because his father was born here: “There’s a little bit of a tug and a tie here,” he revealed.
Although he is now retired, he spent most of his career in management consulting, including seven years in Jersey in the Channel Islands, but also lived in Bermuda, Grand Cayman in the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and Toronto.
This is his third visit to St Albans in that time.
“My hope is that maybe one of your readers will spot the name Weedon and say, well, I have a couple of titbits in my family history, and they will contact you and say, we know a little bit about Thomas Weedon, Joseph’s brother, who was a handyman and may have been buried in St Peter’s churchyard, or provide other information I’m not aware of.”
