Case Nº 007 · Early 1800s–present · Barnstaple, Devon

The French Polisher’s House

The question

A nephew wanted a house history of his uncle’s Grade II terraced home commissioned as a surprise, without his uncle’s knowledge — so the research had to stay invisible until the finished book was ready to give.

The search

1. The terrace was confirmed Grade II — an early-19th-century row of three, its subject house alone keeping its original fanlight with diagonally set glazing bars, a Regency signature the other two had lost.

2. The 1911 and 1921 censuses placed the same married couple in the house a decade apart: a french polisher working at the town’s celebrated cabinet works, and his wife, no children recorded either time.

3. A newspaper notice from 1924 recorded the wife’s death; two years later her husband placed an in memoriam still giving the house as his address — he stayed on alone for years afterward.

The discovery

The 1939 Register and a 1945 court notice traced the house into new tenancies after the husband finally moved on, closing out a continuous, independently-corroborated story of one couple’s married life behind that single fanlit door. The finished biography was delivered quietly to the nephew who commissioned it, ready to hand over to his uncle as the surprise it was always meant to be.