Transcript

of

Lewis Bearne [Obituary]

Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1889, Vol XXXVII, (1905), p. 32.

Prepared by Michael Steer

The obituary was read at the Association’s July 1905 Princetown meeting. Mr Bearne was member of a well-known and highly respected Newton Bushel family with traceable roots in South Devon to the early 1700s. His parents were Andrew (born 1786, at Highweek) and Catherine (neé Snelling of Newton Abbot). Lewis married Frances Eleanor Bearne (neé Holmes). 'Bearne is believed to be a Huguenot' locational name strongly associated with the West Country but originally from Bearn, in Switzerland . One of the family, Major Lewis Collingwood Bearne, DSO, AM, was a World War I hero. The obituary, from a copy of a rare and much sought-after journal can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Google has sponsored the digitisation of books from several libraries. These books, on which copyright has expired, are available for free educational and research use, both as individual books and as full collections to aid researchers.

Lewis Bearne. Lewis Bearne was born in 1821, and died in September, 1904. For more than fifty years he was a prominent man in the public life of Newton, and held every office in connexion with it. He was a member of the old Local Board, Chairman of the succeeding authority, the Urban District Council, and Vice-Chairman (at his own request) of the Council on the amalgamation of Highweek and Wolborough. He was a county councillor, a justice of the peace, churchwarden, feoffee of the Wolborough Charities, and chairman of the Newton Gas Company. Courteous and affable, he was greatly respected by all who knew him, or who were in any way brought into relations with him. He became a member in 1884, when the Association held its meeting at Newton.