Author: BARR, John Templeton
Biography:
BARR, John Templeton (1802-59: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born possibly on 23 Aug. 1802 and baptised on 26 Sept. at Garstang, St. Helen, Churchtown, Lancashire, the son of John Barr, millwright, and his wife Margaret (Peggy) Whiteside, who had married on 29 June 1802 in the same church. In the 1851 Census he gave Liverpool as his place of birth--which is not necessarily inconsistent with the details given above but it is forty miles away and there is no corroboration for the above birth and baptism. Nothing is known of his education but he entered the Wesleyan Methodist ministry as an itinerant in 1826. The two works listed here are early and exist in single copies in America. There appear to be no copies in British libraries although his other works are widely held. They were both printed in Birmingham and he spent several years there as a minister. (An even earlier title, to which he lays claim on the title-page of the poem of 1825, was The Scripture Narrator, of which there appears to be no other record at all.) As with all Wesleyan ministers, he travelled widely. He married Orlow Coleman (1810-66), also a Wesleyan, on 27 Aug. 1832 at Brede, Sussex. They had at least two children, a daughter and a son: one born at Ashford, Kent, the other at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. In the 1851 Census, the family is recorded at Horton, Yorkshire. At some stage they moved to Chichester, Sussex, where he died on 10 Mar. 1859, aged 58, leaving an estate of under £450, administered by his widow. Several sources give him MA status but it does not appear on the title pages of his works. His religious works included Parental Duties Enforced (1827), a sermon delivered at Witney, Oxford, The Sunday-Scholar’s Guide (1848), and The Wesleyan Church-Member’s Pocket Companion (1849). He wrote various tales based on his experiences but these were all vague and lacked concrete detail, with some appearing posthumously, for reasons unknown: The Recollections of A Minister(1847), The Cottage of Content; or, Incidents in the Life of A Birmingham Man (1863). (ancestry.co.uk 10 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 10 Nov. 2022; Birmingham Daily Post 24 Mar. 1859; NPC; William Hill, An Alphabetical List of All the Wesleyan-Methodist Ministers and Preachers on Trial [14th edn. 1892], 208) AA
Other Names:
- J. T. Barr