A 1770 Indenture of Matthias Gale, merchant, of London, Whitehaven and Maryland
This indenture of 28 June 1770, never previously published, contains an agreement between Matthias Gale of London, merchant, and John Hasill, mariner, regarding the ownership of a property in Workington, a town in Cumbria on the north-west coast of England near the port of Whitehaven. Matthias, whose elder brother John was my ancestor, was one of an extensive family in Whitehaven who had prospered in trade with the American colonies, where they owned tobacco interests in Maryland and Virginia and several of them settled (Matthias' uncle George Gale married the widowed Mildred Washington, grandmother of the future President George Washington).
Catgill Hall, Cumbria, in the 1820s.
You can read all about the Gale family in the 18th century and their American connections on this excellent website by Gayle Mandell, and you can see Matthias' place in the family pedigree below from Burke's Family Records (1894). Like his brothers and uncles, Matthias was a merchant whose considerable interests included ship-owning, acting as an agent for American colonists, land ownership and speculation in Maryland and Virginia as well as in property in Britain, as shown by this indenture. Much of the Gale family fortune rested on their involvement in the tobacco trade. Though based in London, Matthias had been born in Whitehaven and from 1765 owned Catgill Hall, a country house that still exists near Egrement in Cumbria.
Matthias' daughter Jane married her second cousin Wilson Gale, who afterwards changed his name to Gale-Braddyll and became High Sheriff of Lancashire and Member of Parliament for Lancaster and Carlisle. The two paintings below by Joshua Reynolds, in the Wallace Collection in London and the Fizwilliam Museum in Cambridge, show Jane about 1788 and a family group about 1789. The boy is their son Thomas Richmond-Bradyll-Gale, who after serving as an officer in the 2nd Foot in the Peninsular War became an MP like his father.
Matthias' daughter Jane Gale-Braddyll, by Joshua Reynolds, 1788 (Wallace Collection, London, P47).
Jane Gale-Braddyll and family, by Joshua Reynolds, 1789 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, PD.10-1955).
An extract from Burke's Family Records (1894) on the Gale family, showing Matthias. The same pedigree shows his descent from John Gale (born 1641), the first of the Whitehaven Gales, and also the descent from Matthias' brother John to my great-grandmother, Helen Mary Gale (born 1881). You can see the entire pedigree on Ancestry.co.uk.
