Author: Morgan, William
Biography:
MORGAN, William (c. 1773-1852: findmypast.com)
The burial record provides the birth date, counting back from his age of 79 years at death. He was most probably the son of John Morgan and Ann (or Anne) Rich, who had married in Bristol on 4 Aug. 1771. Baptised at Bristol, Gloucestershire, on 23 Apr. 1773, he was buried on 9 Oct. 1852 as a Unitarian in the family vault at Lewin’s Mead burial ground, Brunswick Square, Bristol, where there was a Unitarian chapel. Nothing is known of his education or occupation but he evidently had an independent income and left an estate valued at under £8000. He does not appear to have married or had children. His will, made in 1824, describes him as a “Gentleman” resident in the parish of St. James in Bristol and names two men, John Vaughan and Edward Russell, as executors. In 1814, when his only known publication appeared, he had left Bristol and moved to the hamlet of Bower Ashton, on the outskirts. Long Ashton, just outside the city boundary, is in Somerset. The poem is a record of his walks in the area; an “Advertisement” proposes a larger, illustrated quarto edition if the poem succeeds, but no such edition emerged. He moved in collecting circles, is mentioned for the loan of a rare manuscript chronicle, and sold a four-and-a-half-foot fossil of an ichthyosaur that he had discovered at Watchet in 1818 to the Royal College of Surgeons in London for its museum. He later moved to Freeland Place, Hotwells, Clifton, Bristol, where he died on 3 Oct. 1852. (findmypast.com 16 July 2023; ancestry.com 16 July 2023; Bristol Mercury 9 Oct. 1852; William Tyson, The Bristol Memorialist [1823]; The Geological Curator 2 [Oct. 1980], 562)