Methodism and the Holmes family

The story of Methodism in our family runs through two very different worlds: the rural midlands of Ireland and the villages of the Black Forest in Baden. Yet these two traditions — one shaped by Irish Primitive Methodism and the other by German Lutheran Pietism — eventually converged in the marriage of my great-grandparents, John Holmes and Albertina Zimber. Their shared Methodist faith may well have been one of the strongest influences drawing them together.

My grandfather Tom came from a Methodist family, though the Holmes family itself had originally belonged to the Church of Ireland. The transition can be seen clearly in the Irish census returns of 1901. In it, his grandfather John Holmes is recorded as Church of Ireland, while John's wife Anna Maria Lee and their children are listed as Methodist. It seems likely that, through marriage and family life, the Methodist tradition of the Lees became the faith of the Holmes household.

Methodism itself originated as an evangelical revival movement within the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century under the leadership of John Wesley and his brother Charles. It emphasised personal faith, disciplined Christian living, Bible study, and active involvement by ordinary lay people. Ireland played an important role in Wesley's ministry. He first visited in 1747 and returned on twenty-one subsequent occasions, travelling extensively throughout the country and establishing Methodist societies that would become a lasting feature of Irish religious life.

The Lee Family and Irish Primitive Methodism

The Methodist tradition in the family came primarily through Anna Maria Lee, whose family were deeply connected with the Primitive Methodist movement in the Midlands.

Anna Maria Holmes (née Lee)

Her father, George Lee, and his brother William were born in Rahugh, County Westmeath, into a family already steeped in early Methodism. George Lee's obituary records that his parents belonged to the Primitive Methodist Society. This specific Irish movement emerged from an 1818 schism, aiming to preserve loyalty to John Wesley's original ideals, including remaining within the Church of Ireland for sacramental purposes. During the nineteenth century, Rahugh and nearby Tyrrellspass formed a crucial geographic network for this Primitive Methodist activity. By the late 19th century, both branches of Methodism had reunited into the Methodist Church we know today.

The groundwork for this community was laid much earlier. During his April 1748 Midlands tour, John Wesley established a vital foothold for Irish Methodism in the region. In Tyrrellspass, his preaching sparked a rapid spiritual revival that eventually culminated in the building of the 1814 chapel on the village green. While Wesley found the wider Midlands crowds challenging—likening his early preaching in nearby Athlone to "striking hot iron upon an anvil"—he successfully secured Rahugh as a permanent base, linking it to his regional headquarters at the nearby Coolalough estate.

The Lees were a substantial local family, with several branches becoming pillars of this local Methodist network. Decades later, a distant relative, Edward Lee, became well known as an unusually progressive employer and philanthropist in early 20th-century Dublin. Notably, he took a principled stand against William Martin Murphy and other Dublin merchants by supporting his workers during the bitter 1913 Dublin Lockout.

Anna herself was also born in Westmeath, but at some point, George and William Lee moved south-east to Clonsast, County Offaly, where they established themselves as farmers and became central figures in the local Methodist community. Their importance was not merely as attendees at chapel services: according to family tradition and Methodist accounts, the brothers helped establish the Methodist meeting house at Clonsast on land associated with the family itself. In rural Ireland, where small dissenting congregations often lacked wealth or formal structures, this kind of contribution was essential to the survival of local Methodism.

Clonsast Methodist Church c1900

The obituaries of both brothers reveal the depth of their religious commitment and the role their homes played in Methodist life.

George Lee’s obituary, published after his death in 1881, describes the household in which he was raised as “a sanctuary for Methodism, and a home for its preachers.” Although deeply religious throughout his life, the obituary records that he underwent an especially profound spiritual experience only months before his death. The account reflects the strongly evangelical character of Primitive Methodism, with its emphasis on personal conversion, assurance of salvation, and heartfelt religious experience. During his final illness, George was described as bearing suffering patiently and finding comfort in Scripture and Wesleyan hymns read aloud by his wife.

William Lee, who lived until 1914, was remembered somewhat differently: less for dramatic conversion than for constancy of character. His obituary presents him as a pillar of the local Methodist community — hospitable, upright, cheerful, and deeply respected across denominational lines. Methodist itinerant preachers regularly stayed in his home, and he was praised for his generosity, reliability, and public spirit. Particularly striking is the obituary’s emphasis on his broad goodwill toward both Protestants and Catholics, suggesting a type of practical rural ecumenism that was often necessary in small Irish communities.

Together, the brothers embodied many of the defining characteristics of Irish Primitive Methodism: lay leadership, hospitality, disciplined personal religion, and strong local networks centred on home, chapel, and community. Their faith was not simply private belief, but something woven into everyday life and expressed through service to neighbours and fellow believers.

The influence of the Lee family appears to have carried into the next generation through Anna Maria Lee, whose Methodist identity remained strong enough that her children were raised within that tradition, even while their father retained his Church of Ireland affiliation.

Her daughter Pamela Anna Holmes (1876–1947), sister of my great-grandfather John Holmes, was highly likely (though not yet absolutely proven by a primary record naming her in full) the “Miss P. Holmes of Dublin” recorded in the 1910 Methodist Conference as one of the first women admitted to participation in the governing structures of Irish Methodism.

The Zimbers, the Hummels, and German Pietism

If the Lees brought Irish Methodism into the family, the Zimbers brought something remarkably similar from Germany.

Albertina Zimber was the daughter of a Black Forest clockmaker who settled in New Ross, County Wexford. The family originated in the Neukirch/Furtwangen region of Baden, an area famous for its clockmaking industry. Although this part of Germany was predominantly Catholic, the Zimbers belonged to the Lutheran tradition, apparently influenced by Albertina’s great-grandfather, Josef Hummel.

Family tradition holds that Josef Hummel encountered Protestant ideas during his clock-trading journeys to England and brought Lutheranism back with him to the Black Forest. He became an important figure in the evangelical community around Neukirch and Furtwangen and is remembered locally as a founder of the Lutheran congregation there. His son, also Josef, served as mayor of Neukirch before being removed from office in the political turmoil that followed the Baden revolution of 1848.

A Pietist prayer meeting

Josef Hummel’s religious outlook was likely shaped by nineteenth-century Lutheran Pietism, a movement that emphasised personal conversion, disciplined devotion, Bible reading, moral seriousness, and active participation by lay believers. Pietism placed less emphasis on formal theology and more on inward religious experience — what many Methodists would later describe as “heart religion.”

Because of this, the Zimber family’s eventual connection with Methodism in Ireland may have felt entirely natural. Methodism itself had been deeply influenced by German Pietism and by the Moravian movement that shaped John Wesley’s own spiritual development. Many of the practices and ideals of Methodism — small-group fellowship, practical holiness, personal testimony, and the expectation that faith should visibly shape daily conduct — would already have been familiar within a Pietist household.

In this sense, the Zimbers’ attraction to Methodism in Ireland may not have represented a major religious change so much as a continuation of an already existing spiritual culture in a new country.

After the death of her father, Albertina went to work as a draper’s assistant in Merrick & Ruddell’s department store in Dungarvan, County Waterford. Significantly, the Ruddell family were themselves Methodists. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, Methodist communities often formed close social and commercial networks, creating connections that extended beyond worship into employment, friendship, and marriage.

Faith as a Family Connection

Seen together, the stories of the Lees and the Zimbers reveal two parallel religious traditions that ultimately converged in Ireland. Though separated by geography and culture, both families were shaped by forms of Protestantism that valued personal faith, moral discipline, hospitality, lay involvement, and close-knit religious community.

For John Holmes and Albertina Zimber, Methodism may therefore have provided not only a shared church affiliation but a common spiritual language and social world. Their marriage united two families whose religious traditions, though originating in very different places, had evolved in strikingly similar ways.

The result was a Methodist inheritance that would continue through later generations of the Holmes family — an inheritance rooted both in the meeting houses of rural Offaly and the Pietist traditions of the Black Forest.

Black Forest Clockmakers in Ireland and Cornwall: Migration, Industry, and the Zimber Family

 

In the nineteenth century, the small towns and villages of Germany’s Black Forest region sent skilled craftsmen across the world. Among them were members of the Zimber family, who established long-running clock and jewellery businesses in New Ross, County Wexford, and Bodmin in Cornwall. Their story reflects a broader history of migration, industrial change, and family enterprise that connected rural Germany with provincial Ireland and Britain during the age of industrialisation.

The history of the Zimber family can be understood not simply as a story of emigration, but as part of the wider transformation of the Black Forest clock industry itself. As traditional rural clockmaking came under pressure from industrialisation during the nineteenth century, many families adapted by creating international trading and retail networks that stretched far beyond Germany.

The Black Forest and the Origins of Clockmaking

The Black Forest (Schwarzwald), in southwestern Germany, became one of Europe’s great clockmaking regions from the eighteenth century onward. Unlike the large urban workshops of England or France, Black Forest production was overwhelmingly rural and domestic.

A clock-making workshop

The industry developed in isolated farming communities where:

• winters were long,
• agricultural income was limited,
• and families needed supplementary work during the colder months.

Clockmaking evolved as a decentralised “cottage industry.” Rather than large factories, production was spread across households:

• one family carved wooden plates,
• another produced gears,
• another painted dials,
• while itinerant traders carried clocks across Europe for sale.

  A traditional clock peddlar

This social structure created a highly cooperative local economy. Entire villages became dependent on clockmaking, and specialist skills were passed down through generations. The work was organised through networks of kinship, apprenticeship, and local merchants rather than industrial corporations.

Early Black Forest clocks were typically:

• wooden-framed,
• weight-driven,
• and relatively inexpensive compared with English or French clocks.

By the early nineteenth century, the region was exporting enormous numbers of clocks internationally.

The Crisis of the 1870s

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the traditional Black Forest system was under increasing pressure.

Industrialisation transformed clock production:

• factory-made brass movements replaced handmade wooden mechanisms,
• mechanised manufacturing reduced prices dramatically,
• and large firms in Germany, America, and France outcompeted small rural workshops.

The old cottage system struggled to survive.

Zimberhausle and clock workshop

The 1870s were especially difficult:

• population growth increased pressure on already poor rural communities,
• profits collapsed,
• and many craftsmen fell into debt.

German unification in 1871 accelerated industrial concentration in urban centres, while remote artisanal regions like the Black Forest were left economically vulnerable.

For many clockmaking families, emigration became both an economic necessity and a business opportunity.

Migration Without Breaking Family Ties

Importantly, emigrants from the Black Forest rarely severed contact with home. Instead, many families created international trading networks.

A common pattern developed:

• some relatives remained in Germany to maintain supplier relationships and production,
• while others emigrated to establish retail and repair businesses abroad.

The Zimber family appears to have followed exactly this model.

Members of the family came from the Black Forest clockmaking tradition before establishing themselves in Ireland and Cornwall during the nineteenth century. Their businesses demonstrate how emigrant craftsmen often combined technical expertise with family-based commercial networks that stretched across borders.

The Zimbers were not unique in bringing Black Forest clockmaking traditions to Ireland. During the nineteenth century, several German clockmaking and jewellery families established businesses in Irish towns and cities, forming part of a small but significant network of emigrant craftsmen. For example the Dold family settled in Kilrush, County Clare, the Faller family became established in Galway, and the Hartmann family operated in Limerick. Like the Zimbers, these families combined clock and watch repair with jewellery retailing, importing German-made clocks while embedding themselves deeply within local commercial life. Their presence illustrates how Irish provincial towns became connected to continental European manufacturing networks through migration, trade, and family enterprise.

The Zimbers in New Ross

Aaron Zimber, my great-great-grandfather, and his brother Richard settled in New Ross, County Wexford, where they established a clock and jewellery business around 1870. The business continued trading until the 1930s, latterly being run by his daughter, Albertina and her husband, John Holmes. The business was sold to Brooks Jewellers, who are still trading in the Charles Street premises today.

Zimber Bros, Quay, New Ross

At the time, New Ross was still an important commercial port town with strong links to Britain and overseas trade. Nineteenth-century New Ross was closely connected to Liverpool and Bristol through shipping and mercantile networks.

The timing of the Zimber arrival was significant. During the 1870s and 1880s:

• Ireland imported large quantities of German-made clocks,
• Black Forest products dominated the affordable domestic market,
• and German-trained clockmakers enjoyed a reputation for technical skill and reliability.

The New Ross shop likely sold:

• Black Forest wall clocks,
• spring-driven domestic clocks,
• watches and jewellery,
• and later factory-made German clocks from major manufacturers.

Many imported clocks carried only the retailer’s name rather than the original manufacturer’s mark. As a result, clocks sold by the Zimbers may have appeared entirely local while containing German-made movements inside.

Like many emigrant craftsmen, the family probably maintained regular correspondence with relatives who remained in Germany. Such networks helped retailers abroad:

• source stock,
• monitor changing fashions,
• and obtain credit or supply connections.

The Bodmin Branch

Karl Friedrich Zimber, another brother, established a business in Bodmin, Cornwall. Remarkably, this shop survived in family hands until the 1970s.

Charles Zimber's shop in Bodmin

Its early decades likely resembled the New Ross operation:

• importing German clocks,
• repairing watches and timepieces,
• and serving a local market with specialist technical skills.

Cornwall’s maritime connections made imported continental goods readily available through Bristol and London wholesalers.

The longevity of the Bodmin business shows how successfully the family adapted across generations. By the twentieth century, the shop would almost certainly have diversified:

• selling British-made clocks and watches,
• expanding into jewellery,
• and relying increasingly on repair work rather than imported Black Forest stock alone.

Surviving through two world wars and into the late twentieth century required considerable flexibility, especially given the disruption to German imports during and after World War I.

Family Networks and the Black Forest Tradition

The Zimber story illustrates how Black Forest clockmaking families adapted to industrialisation not simply by abandoning their trade, but by internationalising it.

The traditional Black Forest industry had always depended upon networks:

• networks of labour,
• kinship,
• apprenticeship,
• and trade.

Migration extended those same networks internationally.

A brother in Germany might still source movements or maintain supplier relationships while brothers abroad operated retail businesses in Ireland or Britain. In effect, these families became informal international trading firms spanning multiple countries.

This combination of migration and continuing family cooperation helped many artisan families survive the collapse of the old cottage industry.

A Local Story Within a European Transformation

The history of the Zimber family is more than a genealogy of shopkeepers and clockmakers. It is part of a much larger European story.

Their journey reflects:

• the decline of rural artisanal economies,
• the rise of industrial mass production,
• the expansion of international migration,
• and the resilience of family enterprise during a period of immense economic change.

From isolated villages in the Black Forest to the commercial streets of New Ross and Bodmin, the Zimbers carried with them not only technical skills but an entire cultural tradition of craftsmanship and family cooperation.

Today, surviving clocks, shop signs, business records, and family memories preserve traces of that world — a world in which a Black Forest cottage industry became part of the commercial life of Ireland and Cornwall for more than a century.

My Zimber Bros pocket watch

For a full family chronology and documentary timeline, see: “Zimber Bros. – From Schwarzwald to New Ross (Family Record)”

Possible Holmes family origins

Origins of the Holmes Surname in Ireland

Tracing the origins of our branch of the Holmes family in Ireland points most strongly toward an English origin rather than either a Scottish one or a Gaelic surname (Mac Thomáis) that later became Anglicised, both of which are found elsewhere in Ireland. In our case, the family can be traced to north-east Laois and the adjoining areas of Kildare and Offaly, with a long-standing Church of Ireland (and more recently Methodist) background. That combination fits well with the history of English settlement in the Midlands during the Tudor and early Stuart plantation periods.

The Laois connection is especially interesting. Formerly known as Queen’s County, Laois was one of the earliest plantation areas established by the Tudor government in the sixteenth century after the suppression of the O’Mores. English settlers — including soldiers, tenant farmers and estate workers — were introduced into the region in significant numbers, and many Protestant farming families in the Midlands ultimately trace their roots to those plantation-era communities or to later Cromwellian and Williamite settlement.

Coolbanagher Old Church

Coolbanagher Church, designed by Gandon

Family Traditions

I have also heard of a long-standing family tradition that “the first Holmes came to Ireland with Baron Arlington,” the founder of Portarlington. While such stories are often simplified over generations, the tradition is not implausible. Sir Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington, was granted extensive lands in Queen’s County in the seventeenth century and promoted Protestant settlement around Portarlington. The story may not necessarily mean that an ancestor personally arrived in Arlington’s immediate retinue. Still, it could well preserve a genuine memory that the family became established in the area during the Arlington plantation era.

Interestingly, there is also a tradition of a sword handed down from a Williamite — or possibly Cromwellian — soldier. Whether literally accurate or not, that tradition fits naturally with the broader history of military settlement and land redistribution in the Midlands during the seventeenth century.

Estate Connections

Emo Court, designed by Gandon

From at least the late eighteenth century, our branch of the Holmes family also appears to have been closely associated with Emo Court and the surrounding estate, where family members are said to have worked as gamekeepers. These included my 3rd great-grandfather, John Holmes and his father Benjamin. That detail fits very naturally into the social world of the Protestant rural Midlands. Estate employment — as gamekeepers, stewards, craftsmen or tenant farmers — was a common path for long-established Church of Ireland families of modest but respectable standing who were connected to the great landed houses of the region. More recently, my great-great-grandfather John Holmes worked as a Clerk-of-Works on Moore Abbey demesne, continuing that tradition.

A Family with Deep Historical Roots

The surname Holmes itself is especially associated with Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the wider East Midlands/South Yorkshire region — areas shaped by strong Norse and Danelaw influence, where “holm” originally referred to a river meadow or raised ground in marshland. Interestingly, some of my Ancestry DNA results also appear to point toward that same part of England, which aligns closely with the historical distribution of the surname.

At the same time, families like this did not always come directly from England into Laois in a single movement. By the seventeenth century, there were already long-established English-descended Protestant communities in Dublin, Kildare and the wider Pale. Many families moved gradually westward into newly opened plantation lands. It is therefore entirely possible that the Holmes family originally came from England — perhaps from the East Midlands or Yorkshire region — but had already spent one or more generations elsewhere in Ireland before settling in Laois and Offaly.

The family’s Church of Ireland identity over many generations is also suggestive. While religion alone never proves ancestry, it does make it more likely that the family belonged to the long-established Protestant farming and tenant class that emerged from these settlement patterns. Many such families were not major landowners, but ordinary rural families who nevertheless maintained a distinct religious and cultural identity over centuries.

One subtle but important point is that even if the original surname source was English, the family may still have been established in Ireland for many centuries. Some families became thoroughly woven into Irish life over generations, moving within the Pale and Midlands long before modern records began. So while the surname may ultimately have English roots, the family’s Irish identity could still be very deep chronologically.

Finding Albertina

I wrote a post a while back where I located all my ancestors who were alive at the time in the 1901 census. The only thing was I couldn't find my great-grandmother Albertina Zimber. I found her brothers, step-mother, uncles and an aunt but she was nowhere to be found.

Albertina Zimber

Well, I finally tracked her down to Dungarvan,  Co Waterford where she was living over a shop where she worked as a Drapers Assistant. The thing was her surname was significantly misspelt (I submitted a correction and it has now been changed) and her first name was given as Bertha so no wonder she proved elusive.

It might prove useful to note how I did locate her. I used the advanced search options and searched using her age and religion (Methodist) and tried a number of variations on her first name which finally came up trumps.

The Death of Joseph Zimber

I recently found out how Joseph Zimber my great-grand-uncle died. I knew he died in an accident in Montreal on 1st February 1905 only a few months after arriving in Canada (see here).
I have just found the reports below in the Montreal paper "Le Canada". The first report from the 2nd February edition does not name him but the second report from the following day's paper does.
For the benefit of those who cannot read French, he died in an explosion at the Gohier Tannery alongside a Russian Jewish immigrant named Lewis Schoff (or Schoss). The report also indicates that the explosion may have been caused by a barrel of gasoline left too close to the furnace.

Le Canada - 2nd February, 1905

Le Canada - 3rd February 1905