♀Jane Bassett

Jane Bassett (about 1585 – 23 April 1631) was the daughter of a gentleman of Uley, in Gloucestershire, England, and the wife of John Deighton, a surgeon of the city of Gloucester. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Frances Dighton (1612–1706).

Family and descent

Jane was one of the eight children of Edward Bassett, a gentleman of Uley, and his wife Isabel Lygon, and was probably born at Uley about 1585. When her father made his will on 3 June 1601, she was among those he remembered in it. Her mother was a daughter of Henry Ligon of Upton St Leonards and Elizabeth Berkeley, and Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces that ancestry, through both the Ligons and the Berkeleys, until it reaches King Edward I.

Marriage

John Deighton and Jane Bassett married at St Nicholas^W, Gloucester, on 12 April 1605. John, the son of Thomas Deighton of Cirencester, was a surgeon of the parish of St Nicholas, and served as sheriff of the City of Gloucester. The couple are said to have had eight children, three sons and five daughters, and their daughters Jane, Frances and Katherine were baptized at St Nicholas between 1609 and 1614.

Death

Jane died at Gloucester on 23 April 1631, nine years before her husband. She was buried in the south aisle of St Nicholas church, where John was later laid with her, and their gravestone named her as “daughter to Edward Basset, of Uley, Esq.”

The family

Three of the Deighton daughters crossed to New England. Frances went with her husband, Richard Williams, and settled at Taunton. Jane, baptized at St Nicholas on 5 April 1609, is said to have emigrated in 1637 or 1638 with her husband, John Lugg, and after his death she married Jonathan Negus of Boston in 1647. Katherine, baptized there on 16 January 1614, settled at Roxbury with her first husband, Samuel Hackburne; widowed in 1642, she married in 1644 Thomas Dudley^W, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and after his death in 1653 the Rev. John Allin of Dedham.

Notes

Sources

Jane’s parents, her father’s will, her marriage, children and death, and the daughters’ marriages, are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition, vol. 1, pp. 634–636, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry, pp. 264–265, which also prints the words of the gravestone. Richardson cites articles in The American Genealogist (vols. 9 and 10, 1932–1934), John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts and the heralds’ Visitation of Gloucestershire of 1623. Her birth in 1585 at Uley and her death at Gloucester are from an online family tree; Richardson gives neither her birth nor the place of her death.

Her mother’s name

Richardson calls her mother “Isabel (or Elizabeth)” Ligon; the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire names her Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Lygon. Richardson names Edward Bassett’s children as four sons, William, Barnaby, Edward and Giles, and four daughters, Elizabeth, Margery, Susanna and Jane.

The children

The gravestone counts three sons and four daughters; Richardson names eight children, three sons (John, a second John, and Thomas) and five daughters (Jane, Frances, Katherine, Damaris and Mary). He gives Katherine’s baptism as 16 January 1614/5, that is, 1615 in modern reckoning under the Old Style^W calendar, when the year began on 25 March.

The name

Richardson spells her married name Deighton and her own Basset. Frances’s maiden name is usually written Dighton in New England sources, among them James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England.