The Roulliers of Peckham & Camberwell

I am posting this as I would love to hear about my family’s history, hopefully back to its Huguenot beginnings. I get regular emails from Roulliers all over the world, it seems apart from me, we are are taken the clan to the four corners of the Earth.

I am a Roullier on my maternal side, my mother’s family home on East Dulwich Grove, opposite Alleyn’s School, was destroyed during the war. My Grandfather, Richard Roullier, was a volunteer fireman and was killed by a bomb dropped on his fire station at around the same time. With him, and the house, all our family records were destroyed. Grace, my Grandmother who eventually remarried, never discussed her routes much with me, and my mother’s memories are very sketchy. My Grandmother died a longtime ago.

To me it is strange that my branch of the Roullier family, as probable lace makers, never settled in the East End but instead chose rural Peckham & Camberwell, which was then in Surrey, where they appear to have flourished.

The first Roullier to arrive in the area was Jean Alphonsus Ferdinandus Roullier who left France and settled in Peckham around 1790. I know my Grandfather was a cabinet-maker but that is about all, the bits in between are very blurred.

My mother married my father, Robert John William White from Peckham Rye, whom she met at the Grafton Ballroom in Dulwich Village, at Saint Barnabus Church. Their first flat was in Camberwell Grove and I was born a few years later at St Giles Hospital, being baptized at St Giles Church. The same church in which the original émigré, we believe from whom all the Bristish Roulliers are decended, Jean Alphonsus Ferdinandus married Johanna Francisca Daspa on March 20th 1805.

I haven’t moved far! Just to East Dulwich, down Dog Kennel Hill. So called as that is where they kenneled the dogs for the Surrey hunt.