Author: Watmough, Abraham
Biography:
WATMOUGH, Abraham (1788-1863: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 3 Feb. 1788 at St. Chad’s, Rochdale, Lancashire, the fourth of eight children of Abraham Watmough and his wife Betty Whithead who had married in 1777 at Burnley. Nothing is known of his education but he may have been the Abraham Watmough from Rochdale who was discharged from the 2nd Regiment of Dragoon Guards in July 1811 and who became a Wesleyan minister the same year. He married Ellen Ashworth on 12 Aug. 1815 at Rochdale. There does not appear to have been any issue. He spent two years on both the Yarmouth and Lincoln preaching circuits, where he published AHistory of Methodism in the Town and Neighbourhood of Great Yarmouth (1826) and A History of Methodism in the Neighbourhood and City of Lincoln (1829). He also published A Practical Essay on Entire Sanctification (1830). He regularly attended the annual Methodist conferences. His itinerant career is recorded in Hill (1841) and Haswell (1858) with him staying on average two to three years in a wide range of locations. In the 1851 Census they are recorded at Stoke upon Trent. He retired in 1857 and thereafter they are recorded as living in St. Helen’s, Lancashire (1861 Census), where he died on 4 Jan. 1863, leaving an estate of under £600 which included a bequest to a fund for building a Methodist church in St. Helen’s. (ancestry.co.uk 21 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 21 Nov. 2022; Alphabetical Arrangement of All the Wesleyan-Methodist Preachers and Missionaries, ed. William Hill [5th edn. 1841], 169; ed. John P. Haswell [8th edn. 1858], 119-20; Letters [1814-51] at Manchester University Library, NRA 25824) AA