Author: Vansommer, James
Biography:
VANSOMMER, James (1773-1851: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 28 Nov. 1773 and baptised on 19 Dec. at The Artillery, Spitalfields (French Huguenot), the son of James Van Sommer and his wife Mary Johnson, who had married on 30 Oct. 1765 and had at least ten children. His father was a silk mercer and general trader (chapman and dealer) who had several brushes with bankruptcy in the 1780s and died in 1805. In his widow’s will of 1814, the brothers John and George are recorded as stockbrokers of 17 Finch Lane, Cornhill. James was also a stockbroker at Old Broad Street (Post Office Directory 1814, 330). Mary Vansommer left very little wealth but passed on her and her mother’s jewels to her four surviving daughters. (The wealth of the grandfather, John Van Sommer, a flowered-silk weaver of Spital Square, who had died in 1774 leaving thousands to his children and various French charities, seems to have gone.) Nothing is as yet known of James Vansommer’s education. He married Mary Eicke on 9 Mar. 1805 at St. Mary, Islington. They had two daughters. He later became Secretary to the Managers of the Stock Exchange; his only other recorded publication is a series of tables recording fluctuations in the Three Per Cent Consols (1834, 1840). He died on 1 Feb. 1851 at his home in Upper Clapton and was buried at St. John’s, Hackney. Neither the lead poem of "The Minstrel" nor the twenty-four sonnets are particularly original and "On the Sinking Fund" has sunk without trace. (ancestry.co.uk 6 May 2021; findmypast.co.uk 6 May 2021; London Gazette 12 Apr. 1783 et seq.; Public Ledger 12 Mar. 1805; Morning Post 8 Feb. 1851) AA