John Roach
John Roach was a gentleman of the parish of St John the Baptist in Glastonbury, Somerset. His son Thomas became a militia officer, a magistrate and twice Mayor of Glastonbury.
On 24 December 1766 he married Ann Moxham at the church of St Benedict in Glastonbury. The register calls him "John Roach of St John's parish". The witnesses were Thomas Willcox and John Browning. Ann was the widow of John Moxham, and she brought two daughters to the marriage: Ann, then twelve, and Hannah, then nine. The girls had been baptized together at St John's two years before.
Their son Thomas was baptized at Glastonbury on 29 July 1767, as the son of John Roach and Ann. No other child of the marriage has been found. Thomas grew up with his two half-sisters. Seventy years later Hannah still called him "my late brother".
The household had a patron in Thomas Merriott, a gentleman of St John's parish. His will of 1771 gave Ann Roach the house next to his own for her life, with a legacy in money, and gave land to both her Moxham daughters. What tied Merriott to the family is not stated in the part of the will that survives in summary.
By 1779 John Roach was styled "Esquire". On 26 December that year he took the sacrament at St Benedict's, and a certificate of it was filed with the Somerset Quarter Sessions. The law then required such a certificate from any man taking a public office or a military commission. It was proof that he took communion in the Church of England. In the same year he was party to a common recovery. That was a formal, agreed lawsuit that landowners used to free land from an entail, so that it could be sold or resettled.
In 1784 he served as churchwarden of St John's. A churchwarden was an elected lay officer who looked after the church building and kept the parish's church accounts.
He was buried at St John's, Glastonbury, on 5 April 1800. The burial register calls him "Gent". His son Thomas, then about thirty-two, went on to hold the town's highest offices.
His own parents are not proven. The only John of the right age found in the neighbourhood is John, son of John and Elizabeth Roach, baptized at West Pennard, a village near Glastonbury, on 29 August 1737. That family would explain why his son called John Jeanes Roach of Glastonbury a cousin, but no document names the relationship.
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Cite: Heirology, "John Roach (1737-1800)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-roach-1737-1800-33c03e.