♀Agnes Sampson

Agnes Sampson (buried 30 October 1613) was a woman of Hawkchurch, then a parish of Dorset, who became the second wife of Robert Dolbere of Cadhayne in Colyton, Devon, England, in 1563 and lived as his wife for fifty years. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Rawkey Dolbiar (1571–1641).

Marriage and family

On 26 April 1563 Robert Dolbere of Cadhayne married Agnes Sampson at Colyton. The register enters her as “Agnes, d. of one Samson, of Hawke-churche”, a parish then in Dorset, and she was probably a daughter of Nicholas Sampson of Hawkchurch. Robert, already a widower, had buried a daughter, Johane, in 1560.

Robert and Agnes had nine children, all baptized at Colyton between April 1564 and December 1581: Alice, Edith, William, James, Rawkey, John, Mary, Nicholas and a second John. Four of them died young: William lived less than three months and the first John less than four; Mary was buried in April 1579 at the age of two, and the second John in August 1582, before his first birthday.

Two of the daughters married at Colyton: Alice to John Knyght of Totnes in September 1586, and Edith to William Cobley, son of John Cobley of Witheridge, in January 1596/7. In October 1602 Rawkey married Mary Michell, daughter of John Michell of Barretshayes, and raised his own family at Cadhayne.

Death

Agnes was buried at Colyton on 30 October 1613, entered in the register as “Agnes, w. of Robert Dolbiar”. Robert was buried there on 25 January 1614/5, still described as “of Cadhaine”.

Notes

Sources

The family is known from the parish register of Colyton, which A. J. P. Skinner transcribed and the Devon & Cornwall Record Society printed in 1928. John Insley Coddington printed every Dolbere entry from it, with a short pedigree built on them, in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939); the dates here are the ones he printed, and an index of the Devon parish registers carries the marriage of 1563 and her burial as well.

Her family

The register names her father only as “one Samson”. Coddington thought her “almost certainly” a daughter of Nicholas Sampson of Hawkchurch and an elder sister of his children Gregory and Edde, who married at Colyton in 1570 and 1574; he noted too that she and Robert named a son Nicholas. The registers of Hawkchurch only begin in 1663, so the link is unproven. In January 1941 Coddington printed an abstract of the will of Johan Sampson of Hawkchurch, a widow and the mother of Nicholas, made on 26 December 1553 and proved on 31 January 1553/4; it mentions the children of her son Nicholas but does not name Agnes. Hawkchurch was a Dorset parish until 1886, when it was moved into Devon.

Her children

The baptisms of the nine children name only their father. Coddington counted all of them as Agnes’s: they were born after the marriage of 1563, and she lived until 1613. The daughter Johane, buried in March 1559/60 as “d. of Robt Dolbore of Cadayne”, died three years before the marriage, and he made her a child of Robert’s first wife, whose name the register entries do not give.