♀Agnes Airey

Agnes Airey was a woman of Sedbergh parish in Yorkshire, England, the wife of Thomas W. Wilkinson (1767–1840), the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), a direct ancestor. The county history of 1883 that tells Thomas’s story calls his first wife Mary Wilson, but the parish register names her Agnes Airey.

Marriage and children

Agnes and Thomas were married at Sedbergh on 29 May 1792, after banns^W had been called; the register describes him as a bachelor and her as a spinster, both of the parish, and W. Gawthrop officiated. The witnesses were Anthony Wilkinson and William Shaw. A second couple, William Hunter and Mary Wilkinson, were married on the same day and recorded just below them.

Baptisms at Sedbergh in 1792, 1794 and 1796 give Thomas and Agnes as the parents of three children: Robert, Mary and Ann. After 1796 no child of Thomas’s is baptized there until 1804. Thomas married again, to Ann Rae, in 1802, according to a memorial compilation; that second marriage is what makes Agnes his first wife.

Agnes’s own life leaves no other record. An online family tree gives her years as 1769 to 1801, but neither date is backed by a register entry, and the printed Sedbergh registers end in 1800. Her marriage is the only event of her own life that a record gives.

Notes

Her name

The 1883 county history names Thomas’s first wife Mary Wilson, and uses the same name on the same page for his mother. The baptism register names his mother only as Mary, and a FamilySearch tree gives her as Mary Robinson, a point still in question; the 1792 marriage entry names the bride in full as Agnes Airey. A Mary Wilkinson married on the same page of the register the same day, and a Wilson witnessed a marriage close by, so the error may have grown out of that page; this is a suggestion only.

Not to be confused with

Thomas’s second wife, Ann Rae, is a different woman, though she too is sometimes given the first name Agnes.