RootsChat.Com

Tom

I've now joined Lancashire Libraries (they give you a temporary number online) and looked at the Gale database.  It's a very useful resource.

One question: for the Manchester Times of 24 Aug 1889 you said that they 'took the trouble both to report it and give an obituary'.  I could only find the death notice that you quoted originally.  Is there an obituary elsewhere?

Best wishes
Barrie

Tom

Thanks very much for all the info and I will certainly try and get onto the database.  I live in Oxfordshire so there should be several options.  I also sometimes go to Colindale to consult their vast library of newspapers.

James Liddell senior was born around 1765 and came to Bodmin in the late 1780s to set up as a stationer, bookseller and printer.  He was certainly there by 1790, and later information speaks of 1787.  The only reference I had found to Lancashire (before your message) was in his son's obituary  100 years later.

Best wishes
Barrie

I have now mapped out the Liddells back to James Liddell born 1765 who appears to be the first to come to Cornwall (in the 1780s).  He appears to have come from Lancashire (see below).  Anybody know anything about Liddells there?

Best wishes
Barrie


The Royal Cornwall Gazette of 22 August 1889 has a long obituary on James' son Commander James Liddell.  Here is an extract:

‘His father was a native of Lancashire, but Commander Liddell was born at Bodmin, his parents having settled in Cornwall in the closing decade of the last century.’

This article is of course a hundred or so years after James Liddell came to Cornwall and presumably relies on information from relations of James junior, so we can't be sure that it's correct.  In addition his mother Mary was Cornish, so the article got it at least slightly wrong.  However, this information would appear to be all that we have concrete to go on so far.

The IGI reveals that there were Liddells in Lancashire at the appropriate date, but I cannot find a suitable birth of a James around 1765.  It's a mystery why he went to Cornwall.  Presumably he would have been apprenticed to a printer to learn his trade.  But whereso, in Manchester or Liverpool perhaps, or maybe in Exeter, Plymouth or Truro?  I wonder if the connection with the Martyns came first.  Are there any Printers in that family?

I've just found a mention under the Martyn family topic.  Is dmollison there?