As much of the countryside between Middlesbrough and Whitby seems to have been designated the “Captain Cook Heritage Trail” we decided that our own travels this week constituted the Joseph Potter Heritage Trail. We had a full and rewarding time with excellent weather and I’m sure that John and Marion will both have something to say about their impressions.
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News posted today by Seraphim Newman-Norton that the tour around Yorkshire will begin next Tuesday
Next week, John Townsend (Hereford), Marion Sumpter (Falmouth) and I will be visiting sites in North Yorkshire associated with Joseph Potter. We will be staying just outside Middlesborough but plan to visit Stokesley in Cleveland, where Joseph was born in 1769; Great Ayton, where he lived with his aunt and uncle and attended school; and Whitby, where he first went to sea in 1788. Armed with his own account of these early years, we hope to understand how the local landscape influenced this ancestor’s choices. Although much will have changed in the intervening 240 years, we hope there will be sufficient “footprints” to guide us time travellers. Watch this space, as we shall report back on our potterings in the North !
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Todays new extract from the Newman family history website comes from the Joseph Potter section
Joseph Potter recalls an uncle who made his fortune in eighteenth century London as a diamond cutter as well as two of Joseph’s half-brothers who inherited his wealth.
In his Memoirs, recalling the year 1792, Joseph Potter writes:
“We arrived safe in the River Thames and moor’d her abreast of the Tower of London. It came into my mind concerning a rich uncle I had in London which I had never seen, likewise two of my father’s oldest sons of his first wife’s children, Thomas and Ralph Potter …… He died possessed of about one hundred thousand pounds besides all Bell Alley, Coleman Street, belonged to him. He died when I was an infant and my mother alive, but Thomas and Ralph never once wrote to acquaint my mother with his death as the two shared the effects between them….”
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Todays new extract from the Newman family history website comes from the London and Southwark section.
Thomas George Newman (1840-1933), like his grandfather, Joseph Potter, answered the call of the sea to serve as an Able Seaman in the Royal Navy.
Thomas George Newman (1840-1933) was the fourth and youngest son of Samuel Hugh Newman and Elizabeth Myres Potter. As a grandson of Joseph Potter, doubtless he had been told many tales by his grandfather. Bored with school, from which he frequently truanted, and unhappy with living with an aunt who seemed to favour her dogs more than him, he began to think of running away to sea. Twice he set off for Chatham Dockyard but at that time was not tall enough to serve, so was brought back until, finally, having grown to 5 foot 6 inches tall, he was accepted on HMS Waterloo as a Boy 2 Class on 9 August 1857 for ten year’s service.
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Joseph Potter was not only an important link between the older generation of Newmans and their later descendants, but also a remarkable character himself.