TRACY, Samuel William
Samuel William Tracy, sometimes Tracey, was born at Lambeth, London on 5 June 1830 and baptised at Surrey Chapel, Blackfriars Road, Southwark on 13 January 1832, son of John Tracy (1798-21 December 1873), a dental surgeon, and his wife Mary Isabella née Fife (26 April 1803-7 March 1875), he was an elder brother to Agnes Loveridge Tracy, Isabel Martha Wingfield Tracy and Louisa Agnes Tracy. By 1841, his parents John and Mary with their eight children, had moved to Upper Brook Street, Ipswich and in 1851, Samuel was a 20-year-old student, living on Whitton Road, Ipswich with two of his sisters, Mary Catherine and Jessie Fife. He exhibited at the Suffolk Fine Arts Association, held at the New Lecture Hall of the Mechanics' Institute at Ipswich in August 1850, 'Model of Wolsey's Gateway, Ipswich'. On 15 May 1854, of Ipswich, elected and Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and by 1861, a 29-year-old architect and surveyor, living at 9 Hungerford Street, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster with an office at Bedford Chambers, 28 Southampton Street, London. As well as architecture, he designed church furnishings for Cox and Co in the mid-1860s and in 1862 drew up plans for the restoration of Whatlington church, Surrey, a church of which he did an oil painting. On 6 September 1869, when of 112a Edgware Road, Hyde Park, London, was declared insolvent when his estate paid out 1s [5p] in the £1 and shortly afterwards he emigrated to Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, where in the same year the Canadian census shows him living with his brother John, a farmer. He last appears in the RIBA membership list in 1872 and the only person in Canada of the name in the 1881 census was living at Niagara. If the same, he had not prospered, for he is described as a labourer.