Thomas Meredith

Reverend Dr Thomas Meredith D.D, F.T.C.D. (1777–1819) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Doctor of Divinity, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and a distinguished mathematician who gave his findings before the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. He is best remembered for his association with the poet Charles Wolfe and as the subject of a ghost story related in True Irish Ghost Stories and Memorials to the Dead. He was succeeded at Ardtrea by the orientalist, Edward Hincks.

Born at Templerany House, Co. Wicklow, he was the eldest son of Ralph Meredith (1748–1799), Attorney Exchequer and Justice of the Peace for County Dublin; and his wife Martha (1752–1834), daughter of Thomas Chaytor (1728–1797) of Charlemont Place, Dublin; the owner of extensive lands in County Clare. Meredith's father, a member of the Royal Dublin Society, had chosen a legal career in Dublin and passed the management of Templerany (where his family had made their home since the late seventeenth century) to his younger brother, William Meredith (1752–1791), who lived there with his wife, Sarah Garrett (1758–1822) of Janeville & Mount Pleasant House, Co. Carlow; niece of John Cole, 1st Baron Mountflorence, of Florence Court. Thomas Meredith was a grandson of the John Meredith (1711–1786) of Templerany, who c.1750 had two portraits (one large, one small) painted with his whippet by William Hoare at Bath.