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Family Life

Thomas Grubb was an Irish optician and founder of the Grubb Telescope Company. Thomas Grubb was born on the fourth of August 1800 and died on the nineteenth of September 1878 at the age of seventy eight. He was born near Portlaw, County Waterford. He was the son of William Grubb Junior, a prosperous Quaker farmer and draper of Capel Street. and his second wife, Eleanor Fayle both members of the Society of Friends. Thomas was the great-great-grandson of Ishmael Grubb who had emigrated to Ireland from Northamptonshire in 1656. He disowned the Society of Friends on his marriage to Sarah Purser on 12 September 1826. They had nine children. When Grubb died in 1878 the firm continued under his son, Sir Howard Grubb who was born on the twenty eight of July 1844 and died on the sixteenth of September. Grubb was a self-taught Quaker mechanic from Co Waterford. By the 1830s he had established an engineering works at the Grand Canal in Dublin near the Charlemont Bridge. Thomas Grubb had eight children. Little is known about his early life. His rather primitive writing style in later life may suggest that he has comparatively little formal education, though he was undoubtedly an original thinker. He also wrote quite illegibly which suggests little to no formal education. Howard Grubb married in 1871 to Mary Hester Walker, daughter of a physician in Louisiana. In 1826 Thomas Grubb got married to Sarah Palmer  who was born in 1798 and died in 1883 in County Kilkenny. His first daughter was Anabella born in 1927 followed by Ellen in 1829 who died young, Mary Anne another one of his daughters in 1831 and in 1833, Henry Thomas Grubb was his first male child and finally Howard Grubb another male child was born in 1844. For 95 years Thomas and Howard Grubb, father and son, supplied astronomical instruments to the world. Howard Grubb was born in Dublin and entered Trinity College to start studying Engineering but, in 1865, and without completing his course, he left the university and went into the family’s workshops. One of Thomas Grubb's daughters, Mary Ann, married G G Stokes, the Cambridge mathematician and physicist, who as a long-term consultant to the Grubb firm, provided inestimable support on advanced optical therapy.