In 1759, Arthur Guinness founded Ireland’s now-famous Guinness Brewery.
A couple of years later, in 1761, he married his wife Olivia. She had 21 pregnancies — 10 live births and 11 miscarriages. (“It is a testament to her solid constitution that she survived 21 pregnancies in an era when so many women died in childbirth.”)
Here are the names of their ten children (4 girls, 6 boys):
- Elizabeth (born in 1763)
- Hosea (1765)
- Arthur II (1768)
- Edward (1772)
- Olivia (1775)
- Benjamin (1777)
- William Lunell (1779)
- Louisa (1781)
- John Grattan (1783)
- Mary Anne (1787)
Three of Arthur’s sons — Arthur II, Benjamin, and William Lunell — ended up working in the family business.
I don’t know where the middle name “Lunell” came from, but “Grattan” was a surname on Olivia’s side of the family. It was her mother’s maiden name, and it was also the surname of distant cousin/politician Henry Grattan, “through whose lobbying major changes in the fiscal status of beer were eventually secured, most dramatically with the abolition of the excise duty on beer in 1795.”
Sources:
- Arthur Guinness – Wikipedia
- Guinness, Arthur | Dictionary of Irish Biography
- Yenne, Bill. Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
