Author: Weston, Joseph
Biography:
WESTON, Joseph (1774-1831: ancestry.com)
Weston was born into a wealthy landed family with its seat at Hoar Hall in Over Whitacre, a village near Birmingham, Warwickshire. Baptised on 8 July 1774, he was the seventh son and ninth of ten children of Catharine (Unk) and Edward Weston. Little is known of his education and personal life but his few publications are dated generally from the Birmingham area—Solihull, Over Whitacre, or Birmingham itself—and it seems that he stayed close to home. He contributed poems to some local newspapers; the largest collection of his work is contained in approximately 25 pages of the subscription edition of the poems of Priscilla (Pointon) Pickering (q.v.) that he prepared with his friend John Morfitt (q.v.) in 1794. He had earlier translated Morfitt’s Latin poem on archery into English verse. A marriage record of 15 May 1827 for Joseph Weston and Mary Ann Lane in St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, identifies him as a bachelor; the original manuscript record corrects the official version, adding the facts that the bride was a widow and that neither partner was actually resident in the parish. This may or may not be Joseph Weston of Over Whitacre. There is no later record of baptisms for the couple. Weston died after “a lingering illness” at Over Whitacre, aged 57, on 24 Apr. 1831 and was buried there on 29 Apr. His eldest brother Edward (b 1757) was the executor of his will. (ancestry.com 9 May 2024; findmypast.com 9 May 2024; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 2 Aug. 1802; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 2 May 1831)