Author: Foster, William
Biography:
FOSTER, William (1797-1829: findmypast.com)
In 1750 the Moravian Church established a settlement at Ockbrook in Derbyshire. That is where William Foster was most probably born, on 20 Jan. 1797, the second of six children of Frederick William Foster (1760-1835), a Moravian minister and hymn-writer, and his wife Anna-Louisa-Eleonora La Trobe, who had married in 1791. (The public records for nonconformists are patchy but that was the family's place of residence.) The mother was of an aristocratic French family, a refugee from the Revolution; the father inherited money from the Jamaica estates and slaves of his uncle Thomas Foster in 1809. William was united to another family of local country gentry when he married Marianne Bagshawe on 21 Jan. 1817, giving Hazlehurst as the parish of residence. They had one son, born in 1818 (d 1838). Foster's collection of poems is dated from Hazlehurst. It is dedicated to his father, who became a bishop in the Church in 1818, and contains many references to illness within the family, including a long period of ill health of the author himself. He died on 19 Dec. 1829 and was buried at Ockbrook on 26 Dec. (findmypast.com 18 Oct. 2021; Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry [1875] 1: 459; "Frederick William Foster" LBS 18 Oct. 2021; "Frederick William Foster" CDH) HJ