♂Clement Forman

Clement Forman (buried 11 November 1599) was a man of the parish of Brenchley, in Kent, and the grandfather of the George Lewis who went to Plymouth Colony^W in the 1630s. He was the twelfth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Dennys Forman (1579–1626).

Life at Brenchley

Clement is said to have been a husbandman^W, the old word for a small farmer. Clement Forman and Margery Baldock were married at Lamberhurst on 16 February 1567/8. Three daughters were christened at Brenchley: Frances in 1573, Mary on 23 May 1574 and Dennys on 16 August 1579. Frances died in 1573, the year she was christened, and Mary was buried on 13 February 1588, at thirteen. Dennys is said to have been their only surviving child. She married George Lewes, and their first child, Margery, was christened at Brenchley in December 1597.

His will

Clement made his will on 31 October 1599. He is said to have left his house and land to his wife Margery, his executrix, for her life, and after her not to his daughter but to his granddaughter Margery Lewes, then not yet two years old, with the land to pass to “my daughter Dennis” only if the child’s line failed. His son-in-law George Lewes and a William Baldock witnessed it. He was buried at Brenchley on 11 November 1599, eleven days after he made it, and the will was proved on 16 January 1599/1600 in the Consistory and Archdeaconry Court of Rochester, a church court^W that handled the wills of the diocese.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Dennys Forman and her son George Lewis (died about 1663), George’s son James Lewis (1631–1713) and James’s daughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Clement Forman and Margery Baldock. From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

Sources

The marriage, written “Clement Forman & Margery Baldock”, is in the printed register of Lamberhurst marriages from 1564. The christenings and burials of the three daughters, Dennys’s christening to a father written Clement Forman, and Clement’s own burial are from an index of the Brenchley parish registers. His will (dated 31 October 1599, proved 16 January 1599/1600) is known from a typescript Lewis genealogy that cites Robert S. Wakefield’s article in The American Genealogist, volume 68 (1993), and calls him “husbandman (farmer)”; a second compiled genealogy, David Curtis Dearborn’s Ancestors of David Richard Gergen and Anne Elizabeth Wilson, gives the same dates. The terms of the bequest and the witnesses come from a set of typed abstracts of the family’s wills, which give the date of proving as 18 January. That Dennys was the only surviving child rests on the two wills as abstracted, both of which name her as the only living child.

The place of the marriage

The printed Lamberhurst register is published among the parish registers of East Sussex, Lamberhurst having then been counted a Sussex parish. This page places the marriage at Lamberhurst, Kent, the county where the parish lies today.

His parents

His parents are not known.