“The Priestleys,” writes Madame Belloc, the great-granddaughter of the subject of this memoir, in her charming essay, “Joseph Priestley in Domestic Life” (_Contemporary Review_, October 1894), “were of an old Presbyterian stock; one branch of the family acquired wealth and lived at Whiteways, but his (Joseph’s) own immediate ancestors were farmers and clothiers, people of substance in the yeoman class. We can trace them accurately as far as the middle of the seventeenth century, when one Phœbe Priestley, after wrestling with fever in her household, was herself stricken, and ‘lay like a lamb before the Lord’ on her deathbed. Her husband wrote a long and touching account of all she said and did, that her children might know what manner of mother they had lost. These people were presumably of the same stock as the Priestleys of Soylands, who ran back into the Middle Ages. “The children of the Priestley families were all named after scriptural characters. They were Josephs, Timothys and Sarahs from one generation to another. The Bible was stamped into them, and from it they drew all the inspiration of their lives.” Joseph Priestley the elder was born in 1660, and died on August 2, 1745. He married Sarah Healey and had by her eight children, five sons and three daughters, of whom Jonas, the father of Joseph Priestley the younger, born about 1700, was the seventh child and fourth son. Jonas Priestley married Mary, a daughter of Joseph Swift, a farmer and maltster of Shafton, near Wakefield, and had by her six children, four sons and two daughters, of whom Joseph was the eldest and Timothy the second; Martha, the elder girl, who died in 1812, married John Crouch, and was left a widow in poor circumstances in 1786. Another member of the Priestley family who requires mention for the purpose of this narrative is Sarah, the sister of Jonas and second daughter of Joseph Priestley the elder. She was born in 1692 and married John Keighley—“a man who had distinguished himself for his zeal for religion and for his public spirit.” She was left a widow in 1745. Three years before this she took her nephew Joseph, the subject of this memoir, to live with her, and “was fond of him in the extreme.” She died in 1764. Her brother John, Joseph Priestley the younger’s uncle, died on February 28, 1786, aged ninety-two. “He was a remarkable man and of a singularly happy constitution, both of body and mind.” This happy constitution of body and mind seems indeed to have been a characteristic of many members of the family, the several branches of which were remarkably healthy and long-lived.