♀Dorothy Yorke

Dorothy Yorke (died December 1643) was the first wife of Thomas Dudley (1576–1653), deputy governor and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and the mother of the poet Anne Bradstreet^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683).

She was a daughter of Edmond Yorke, a yeoman of Cotton End, Northampton, and his wife Katharyne. Her forename is not in the record that shows this. Edmond Yorke’s will, made on 18 November 1614 and known from a printed abstract, names his sons Nathaniel, Bartholomew and Joseph, “my daughter Dudley”, a daughter Greene, and grandchildren including Samuel and Anne Dudley, and it names Thomas Dudley as one of the overseers. The will names her brothers as Nathaniel, “my eldest son”, Bartholomew, “my second son”, and Joseph. Her sister is named only as “my daughter Greene”, with no forename given. Samuel Dudley was baptized at All Saints, Northampton, on 30 November 1608, as son of Thomas Dudley, so the will’s “daughter Dudley” is the wife of Thomas Dudley and mother of Samuel and Anne, and she is identified as Dorothy by that match of husband and children. A family history published in 1886 had called it strange that neither her surname nor her pedigree had been preserved. That book quotes Cotton Mather^W, who called her a “gentlewoman of good family and estate”, says she came from Northamptonshire, and names five children of the marriage, all born in England: Samuel, Anne, Patience, Sarah and Mercy. Anne married Simon Bradstreet^W and became known as the poet Anne Bradstreet. Thomas Dudley came to New England in 1630 as deputy governor of the colony. Dorothy was buried at Roxbury on 27 December 1643, aged 61; the family history says she died that day of “wind colic” and was laid in the family tomb. Her age would place her birth about 1582. According to the family history, all five children had married and had children of their own before she died, and Anne wrote an epitaph for her that begins “A worthy matron of unspotted life”. The following April, on 14 April 1644, Thomas Dudley married Catharine, the widow of Samuel Hackburn of Roxbury.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Samuel Dudley and his third wife, Elizabeth. According to the published family history and genealogical dictionary, one runs through their son Stephen Dudley, by way of James and John Dudley to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844); the other through their daughter Dorothy and Moses Leavitt of Exeter, whose son Stephen Leavitt was the father of Mary Leavitt, the mother of Anna Smith. Nathaniel Dudley and Anna Smith were therefore third cousins, both great-great-grandchildren of Samuel Dudley, and the two lines meet again in their marriage.