Hearne History - Page 726

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Northampton, England. She is the Author of the hymn "Waiting and Watching for Me." Her life is an unusually busy one, and it was only by dint of persistence and tenacity that I obtained a brief partial sketch of her life and work from her own pen, in which I found she had great aversion to its publicity, especially in England; so that, in deference to her feelings, I give as little as I can as a faithful historian, in justice to the widely extended and numerous family of Hearne. She says, Sept., 1897:

"I believe our name used to be written with an e at the end, though my father wrote it Hearn, and I do the same. He was Joseph Hearn, of Farningham, Kent, the postmaster of the place, and a deacon of the Baptist Church in the next village, Eynoford. His father was Thomas Hearn, and I believe that he belonged to the town of High Wycombe, and that some of his people were lace-manufacturers. My father married in 1833, Rebecca, daughter of George Bowers, a Baptist workingman preacher of considerable force and originality; and on Dec. 17, 1834, I was born at Farningham. I was the oldest of five children, two of whom died young, and I am sorry to say that I am the last survivor of my family. My brother, Thomas Hearn, died in South Africa ten years ago. He left one son, Geoffrey, and one daughter, Margaret, a girl with a very beautiful voice, and these, who live with their widowed mother, at 248 Woodbury Road, Nottingham, are, after myself, the sole representatives of the Hearn family with whom I am connected, for I have never known of cousins or other relatives on my father's side. I believe that he had two brothers, and that one or both went abroad. My sister Hepzibah married Thomas Macgregor Sheerwood. She died four years ago, leaving nine children, and four of her girls live with me and are of great comfort to their aunt. I was eighteen years old when I began to write verse and prose. The first publisher of the Christian World was the minister of the Baptist Church at Eynoford, of which I was a member. He had seen some of my poetry and ask me to write for the first number, and I have written for that journal ever since, only missing to contribute to about forty of the 2,108 numbers that have been published to this date (September 2, 1897). I have also written for the Sunday School Times from its commencement, thirty-eight years ago, and have been the editor of this journal for about twelve years. As these papers are very widely circulated, my name,

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Notes:

Thanks to Catherine Bradford for transcribing this page.


Copyright (c) 1999, 2007 Brian Cragun.