Author: WOOLMER, Samuel
Biography:
WOOLMER, Samuel (1772-1827: ancestry.co.uk)
Samuel Woolmer was born at St. Neots, Huntingdonshire, on 12 Mar. 1772, the youngest child of the Rev. Joseph Woolmer, a dissenting clergyman, and his wife Hannah Hubbard. Both of his parents had died by the time he was twelve and he was left without financial provision. He accepted an offer to travel to Barbados to serve an apprenticeship on the estate of Edwin Lascelles, Baron Harewood. He arrived in Barbados in Feb. 1785. On 2 Mar. 1793 he underwent a dramatic conversion experience while listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Thomas Coke and in 1796 he returned to England determined to join the Methodists. In 1797 he was licensed as an itinerant Methodist preacher and appointed to the circuit in Rye, Sussex. He served as a preacher in locations across England, including in Cornwall where on 4 Aug. 1801 he married Jane (Jenny) Grey (1783-1834); they had numerous children including Theophilus (1815-96) who also became a Wesleyan minister and managed the Methodist press. (S. Woolmer, Exeter bookseller and printer of the Exeter Gazette, and Samuel Woolmer, Methodist preacher, were not, however, the same man.) Towards the end of his life Woolmer suffered from attacks of paralysis and he died on 18 June 1827 at Budleigh-Salterton, Devon. His will left his estate to his widow and children. Woolmer’s other publications include sermons. (ancestry.co.uk 16 Feb. 2025; findmypast.co.uk 16 Feb. 2025; George John Stevenson, The Methodist Hymn Book [1894]; Jacob Stanley, “Memoir of the Rev. Samuel Woolmer”, Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 9 [1830], 289-97) SR