On Saturday 12th July my wife and I took our friend American Wallace scholar Jim Costa, on a visit to Hertford - the town north of London where Wallace went to school. Although it was a 'fun' rather than research trip I did discover a few things which I thought it would be worthwhile reporting:
1) We visited the churchyard of St Andrews to look at the gravestone of Wallace's maternal grandfather John Greenell (1745 - 15 July 1824) and his second wife Rebecca R. Greenell (? - 18 October 1828). Rebecca was the stepmother of Wallace's mother and the Wallace family's move from Usk to Hertford happened because of her death (we don't know exactly why). As far as I know the tomb in which Wallace's Father Thomas and his sister Eliza are buried in has not been identified - possibly because the inscription has eroded away. In his autobiography My Life Wallace says:
"There is also in the same churchyard a family tomb, in which my father and my sister Eliza are buried, but which belonged to a brother of my mother's grandfather, William Greenell, as shown by the following inscription:—
"Under this tomb with his beloved wife are deposited the remains of
WILLIAM GREENELL,
A native of this parish, who resided 56 years in St. Marylebone,
In the County of Middlesex,
Where he acquired an ample fortune,
With universal esteem and unblemished reputation.
He died the 17th day of January, 1791, aged 71."
There is also an inscription to his wife Ann, who died a year earlier, and is described as the "wife and faithful friend of William Greenell, of Great Portland Street, Marylebone." As the tomb was not used for any other interment till my sister's death in 1832, it seems likely that William Greenell had no family, or that if he had they had all removed to other parts of England."
At Hertford Museum we picked up a leaflet on Hertford's Wallace Trail