Lieutenant Charles Welman
and Mrs Charles Welman
(1840-1914 and 1838-1917)
29 May 1863

Volume 10, page 254, sitting number 13,382 and 13,383.

Charles Caesar Welman of the 77th (the East Middlesex) Regiment of Foot was born in 1840 at Puddington in Devon, the eldest son of Charles Noel Welman (1814-1907) of Norton Manor in Somerset, JP and DL for Somerset. Welman père is listed in Converts to Rome: a Biographical List of the More Notable Converts to the Catholic Church (1907). One of his daughters became a nun, as indeed did two of Charles Caesar's daughters.

Charles Caesar Welman joined the 77th Foot by purchase as an Ensign on 6 January 1860. On 23 October 1860 he exchanged to the 49th (Herefordshire) Regiment of Foot.

Eugenia Mary Stoner was born on 6 October 1838 at Shiplake in Oxfordshire,  the youngest daughter of the Honourable Charles Henry Stoner, of Holmwood, Oxfordshire. Her father was killed in a freak accident when she was still an infant. ‘As the Honourable Charles Stoner, brother of Lord Camoys, was watching the fall of a large beech tree in his park at Holmwood, Henley-on-Thames, from the saturated state of the ground it suddenly fell on, and so seriously injured him, that he survived but a few hours’ (Kilkenny Journal, 15 February 1840).

On 26 November 1862 Charles Caesar Welman married Eugenia Mary Stoner at Torquay. The marriage produced three sons and five daughters.

Welman retired from the Army the following year with the rank of Lieutenant. By 1868 he was a Lieutenant in the West Somerset Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry.

The couple appear on the 1881 census living at the Priory, Prior Park, Somerset. Major Welman gave as his profession ‘JP for Somerset, Major West Somerset Yeomanry.’ Also present on the night of the census were three of their children and four servants.

In 1911 they were living with their unmarried daughter Una Mary Welman at 27 Holmesdale Road, Teddington. Major Welman died there, aged 73, on 3 February 1914, leaving effects valued at £445. Mrs Welman died, aged 78, on 27 April 1917 at 27 Holmesdale Road, Teddington. She left effects valued at £697. 

A mid-20th-century article on the Welman family in the Taunton Courier (12 November 1949) concludes: ‘Although Charles Noel Welman had so many sons, there are now only two Welmans living – Mr Paul Arundel Welman and his 14-year-old son.’