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The story of Robert Browne's descendants
Robert Browne I had two sons and three daughters We haven't really tried to research the families of his daughters Mary and Elizabeth (this remains to be done) but the family of his youngest daughter, Susanna, was recorded by Crisp over 100 years ago, as she married James Hughes, one of the china painters at the porcelain factory. She is buried beside the Browne tombs to the south of the west door of St Margaret's church. The Browne tombs are so covered in ivy these days as to be illegible, but I transcribed the inscriptions 20 years ago, when they were uncovered. Robert's elder son, John, was a blacksmith. My theory is that John took over his father's business when he married in 1757, leaving Robert free to take up another business interest, i.e. porcelain manufacture. The younger son, Robert II, was only 16 at the time of John's wedding and therefore joined his father in the china business almost from the beginning.
Note: Conjecture on my part: I think it is possible that Robert Senior bought the blacksmith shop for John, but retained the ownership with John paying rent - Robert being a chemist apparently also in Lowestoft.. My feeling is that Robert was a business man primarily and that such an arrangement would have been seen as "proper". Similarly, the two professions do not seem likely to be compatible. But Sukie's proposition is equally possible. - RG
John only survived his father by a couple of years and thus his children lost control of the blacksmith's business, which was left by Robert I to provided an income during her life for his widow, to pass to John after her death. As John predeceased his mother, this arrangement was invalidated and the blacksmith's shop eventually came into the ownership of Robert II, who I presume bought it from the estate after his mother's death. John's widow and her children seem to have moved to Blundeston after his death and the three youngest of them, Robert, Anne and Susanna, married members of the Thurtell family on the same day in September 1787. Susanna thus became the mother of John Thurtell, the murderer. His crime is not much remembered now, but in its time it was as famous as the murder in the Red Barn. It had serious repercussions for the Thurtell family, because as it was an unusual name outside Norfolk people were clearly always asking them if they were related to the murderer and the families of several of John Thurtell's cousins changed their names. However, his Browne cousins, who lived in Pudding Norton Hall, near Fakenham, were not affected by this and were OK, if a bit impoverished. John, the son of Robert Browne of Pudding Norton, married his cousin Maria Thurtell and had 24 children, but they never had enough money to support them in the style to which they aspired, and most of the children emigrated.
There were other people called Browne in the Fakenham area in the early 19th century and I think they may have been related to Robert I - otherwise what took his grandson to Pudding Norton in the first place, given that he started off in Bradwell? The eldest son of John and Maria Browne, John Robert, married Elizabeth Heitland, whose mother was a Browne and whose family lived in the next village to Pudding Norton. I have still to investigate this possible connection.
Robert Browne II married Elizabeth Woodthorpe, who was quite a catch, I think - her family owned most of Carlton Colville and were genuine gentry. The Woodthorpes eventually failed to produce enough heirs, however, and died out in east Suffolk in the late 19th century. I think Elizabeth's father lived at the Uplands, Carlton Colville, but this may be wrong - it is difficult to work out which Woodthorpe owned which estate and passed it on to which other Woodthorpe. Elizabeth's grandfather had lived somewhere in Oulton. I have a hunch that the Carlton Colville properties had come to the Woodthorpes from Elizabeth's grandmother, but as the parish record is defective at that point I don't know what her maiden name was and haven't got very far with researching this area.
Robert and Elizabeth had a large family of whom seven - Sarah, Elizabeth, Robert, John, Ann, Benjamin and Lois - lived to grow up. Ann married Henry Rush in 1804, and otherwise I know nothing about her (another branch still to be investigated).
Sarah married John Chaston, who was a linen draper in Lowestoft High Street, as mentioned above. They also had a large family, although a lot of them died prematurely. John Browne Chaston, the eldest son, and the fourth son, Daniel, carried on the family business, but Daniel left it in the mid 1830s (possibly at the time that John B's eldest son joined the firm) and ended up in Caston, in west Norfolk, where he was the Registrar, and I think also the local bank and insurance agent. Unfortunately, John Browne Chaston's family all died young. His sons John and Daniel, who took over the Chaston family business, died without issue aged 40 and 28 respectively and the business was wound up in the 1860s. The other son, Robert, who was a chemist at 82 High Street, Lowestoft, died aged 41, leaving a son, who died unmarried in his early 30s, and a daughter who remained unmarried until her middle 40s and then finally married the man who had been running the chemist's shop for at least the last 30 years. They had no children. John B.'s only daughter, Sarah, married a grocer in Beccles, Robert Burtsal, but died a month after the birth of her only child, a daughter.
Robert Chaston, second son of John and Sarah, seems at the moment to have been a seaman, but had no children. The third son, George, went to London where he was a bank clerk. John and Sarah's eldest daughter, Mary, married a merchant in Yarmouth called Watling. What kind of merchant I haven't yet found out. The second daughter, Sarah, married James Warden Gowing, who I think was a scion of the Lowestoft rope manufacturing family, but also seems to have succumbed to the lure of being a gentleman farmer, this time at Aldeby Hall, Loddon. John and Sarah's youngest daughter, Ann Elizabeth Chaston, married William Shearing, a farmer in St Cross South Elmham whose sister was married to Ann's brother Daniel, and is one of my ancestors. The two youngest of the family, Alfred and Benjamin Chaston, both went to Watton in west Norfolk, where Alfred was the bank manager (married but with no children) and Benjamin the chemist. Benjamin (who was apparently unmarried and died in his 40s) was engaged with Jacob and Henry Young Finch of Swaffham (who I think were Alfred Chaston's brothers-in-law) in the introduction of superphosphate artificial fertilisers, developed by John Bennet Lawes. I can't remember the details of this, which used to be on the Internet but have disappeared, but it does show that the interest in chemistry attrubuted to Robert Browne I was passed on to his descendants.
Elizabeth Browne married William Williams, about whom I know absolutely nothing. However, their son, William Woodthorpe Williams, started a successful haberdashery business in London, W. Williams & Son (Bread Street) Ltd, which is still operating. The Williamses may have had other children, but so far I haven't managed to identify them.
Robert Browne III had a grocer's business in Lowestoft High Street, possibly at no 160. I believe that a portrait of Robert appears on a piece of Lowestoft china. Although Robert was the senior male member of the Browne family, he doesn't seem ever to have contemplated joining the porcelain firm, which supports the idea that the owners had a predetermined time at which they intended to cease trading, and Robert III therefore had to have another source of income. In 1798 Robert married Sarah Boby from Beccles and for the next 14 years Sarah had a child virtually every year, of whom ultimately only one survived, Robert IV. I have asked various doctors of my acquaintance what they think was wrong with Sarah's babies, and no-one has come up with 'the answer'. I think that Rhesus incompatibility is the most likely solution, although Robert and Sarah were very unlucky only to have two Rhesus-negative children out of 12. Robert was also the organist of St Margarets, Lowestoft (apparently from the age of 14), and when he died his son Robert IV, who was a music teacher by profession, took over. By the time Robert IV retired from being the organist, apparently in 1894, the two Robert Brownes, father and son, had been the organists of St Margarets for over a century. Robert IV was also said on his tombstone to be the organist of St Peters, although how he managed to do both I don't know!
John Browne, middle son of Robert II, was also a church organist, of Holy Trinity, Bungay. Unlike his brother Robert it seems to have been his principal job. John was married to Sarah Boby's younger sister Susanna, and only half of their ten children seem to have survived infancy, making the diagnosis of Rhesus incompatibility for Susanna too quite likely. The youngest daughter, Lois, died aged 17, and the next daughter up, Elizabeth, was unmarried. The only son, Robert, was married but childless and had a boy's school in Wharton Street, Bungay. The second daughter, Susanna, married a man called Aldis(s) and I am still trying to trace them. The eldest daughter, Sarah, married Henry Spall, who was an auctioneer and rent/tax collector in Bungay. Sarah also appears to have lost half of her children in infancy, being left with three. Her only surviving son died unmarried in his 30s. Her elder daughter, Susanna, married Augustus Crook, who was the Bungay vet. The younger daughter, Sarah, who was a music teacher, married her mother's double first cousin Robert Browne IV, who was more than 20 years older than she was. Robert and Sarah had 13 children, most of whom survived infancy. This would figure if both Sarah and Robert were Rhesus-negative. They lived at 160 High Street, Lowestoft, I think until Sarah died in 1883, closely followed by her teenage daughters Emily and Sarah, after which the family moved to 34 Queen's Road. I haven't yet worked out what happened to some of the children, but Robert V, the eldest, was a musician and music teacher in Greenwich and I think it was him from whom Crisp bought the original collection of Lowestoft china (is it that collection that makes the nucleus of the collection in the Castle Museum in Norwich?) and got the information for the Pedigree. Robert V's descendants include Robert Woodthorpe Browne, who is or has been a Liberal parliamentary candidate and appears on the Internet quite a bit. Two of his younger sisters, Edith and Maud, and their youngest brother Ernest, were still living in Queen's Road in 1901. Edith was a music teacher, Maud a dressmaker and Ernest a composer and teacher of music. I haven't managed to trace any of Ernest's compositions, though, so possibly he wasn't a terribly successful composer!
Benjamin Browne, youngest son of Robert II, had several careers but ended up as a fish merchant in Leeds. Why Leeds I have no idea. He had two wives. By his first he had four sons, but only one had any children. He was Benjamin Wells Browne, who was a fish merchant and auctioneer in Lowestoft. However, both he and his wife died quite young, which left their large family of sons rather badly off, I suspect. Robert, the fourth son, stayed in Lowestoft and was also an auctioneer. He lived at 136 Denmark Road and had a large family. The other sons went to London, where William was a chemist, Thomas a foreman painter and decorator, Frederick a tobacconist and Edward, after a spell as a draper's assistant in the firm of William Tarn & Co., became a publican. They didn't have a lot of children between them.
By his second wife, Benjamin Browne had a son and a daughter. The daughter married Robert Burtsal, miller at Ellingham on the Waveney, and is another of my ancestors (their daughter Ellen married Fred Shearing, son of Ann Elizabeth Chaston, and was my grandmother's grandmother). The son, John, became a dentist in Leeds. One of his sons, Lucien, also became a dentist, while the other, Reginald, I suspect emigrated to South Africa. The last time I managed to trace Reginald he was a medical student so he presumably became a doctor (if he survived).
The youngest of Robert II's children, Lois, married William Beare and lived in Bungay. What William did I haven't yet been able to find out. Both he and Lois died prematurely and so did several of their children. The surviving children went to London to seek their fortune. Two of the daughters, Charlotte and Marianne, married drapers of one sort or another, while the eldest daughter, Lois, married William Tarn, who made a fortune out of his department store at the Elephant & Castle and was the mid-Victorian equivalent of a multimillionaire. Large numbers of relatives started their careers in his establishment. Their grandson, Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn, was a well-known amateur historian who was an authority on Alexander the Great. Of the Beare sons, George was a printer in Grays Inn Road, with a family who also tended to die quite young, while William Woodthorpe Beare was also a draper, probably in partnership at one time with William Tarn, seems to have been comfortably off, and died in Pembrokeshire on his 85th birthday. He left only one child, a daughter who was married to a wealthy worsted spinner in Bradford.
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