Brownes of Honiton - 17th and 18th century

[Geordie daughter]

I having been tracing members of the Browne family who were in Honiton from at least the 1620s, and they are proving tricky to gather data on, not least because around 1705, John Browne became a Nonconformist, so baptisms/births for his children are patchy.

I am hoping that someone may be able to help me with various bits of information on John Browne and his family in particular, but anything on related Brownes would be good too, as it will help to provide a bigger picture. John (youngest surviving son of cutler William Browne and his wife Hannah) was a gunsmith by trade, and he seems to have married twice, first to Mary Hall (d. March 1716), and then to a lady called Hannah. I have found the first marriage, but, frustratingly, not the second, which I've estimated to have taken place some time between 1717-1720, and is the one I'd really like to have the details of. John and Hannah had a son Arthur (baptised 1728) who was a bookseller and eventually settled in Bristol with his family, but there were at least two other children of this marriage, for whom I can't find baptisms, but who appear in the parish burial registers: William, buried July 1720, and Jane, buried May 1731.

John previously had a son John (bapt. 1706) by his first wife Mary, and also possibly a son named Samuel (b. circa 1710?) who may be the bookbinder who married Diana Smith in Honiton in 1738, and had a son named Francis. John junior was apprenticed to clock maker Henry Bunston of Lyme Regis in 1720, and I would be grateful for any information whatsoever on his career as a clock maker, as so far I have only found one brief mention of a clock made by "John Browne of Honiton" (on an online auction site).

[Betchworth]

I too have been researching John Browne the Honiton gunsmith, my interest being through his third son Benjamin from his second marriage to Hannah. Benjamin was said, by two of his granddaughters, in a recorded conversation with their nephew in the late 1800's, to have had two brothers and one sister. William and Arthur, who both eventually moved to Bristol and were at one time partners in a book selling and printing business, were his older brothers, but his sister has remained unknown, unless she was the Jane Browne buried in 1731. Benjamin moved to Somerset around 1760 and then across the border into Wiltshire, where he was a maltster, brewer and Bradford-on-Avon inn owner, before dying in 1793.

Benjamin's older half-brothers seems to have been John (baptised in 1706), Samuel the bookbinder, Francis the maltster and Robert the gardener who eventually became the publican of the Anchor Inn beside the bridge at the bottom of Honiton High Street, until it burnt down. Presumably one of these half brothers brought him up when he was orphaned, aged 8, after the deaths of Hannah in 1738 and John in 1743. Unfortunately John's will didn't survive the bombing of the Exeter probate office in WW2 as I'm sure it would have provided a wealth of information about the family and their circumstances. 

John Browne junior appears on many Ancestry family trees as having married in Ottery St Mary and lived there as a weaver, before moving in later life to Luppitt. I have not found any mention of a John Browne being apprenticed as a clock maker but it makes perfectly good sense, given that a Sarah / Sally Browne married Honiton Presbyterian William Murch in 1789, and their son became a clock maker. He provided the clock in the tower of St Paul's Church Honiton and was town Mayor. Meanwhile, in Bristol, William Browne's daughter Hannah also married a clock maker. 

One of William's sons through Ann Harris, John William Browne, emigrated to Ohio and his son, the Rev. Samuel J Browne of Cincinnati became wealthy as a newspaper publisher. Through William's line, John and Hannah Browne of Honiton have many living descendants in the USA.