♂John Deighton

John Deighton (baptized 18 November 1568 – 16 May 1640) was a surgeon and gentleman of the city of Gloucester, England, and served as a sheriff of the city. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Frances Dighton (1612–1706).

Gloucester

John was the son of Thomas Deighton and his wife Anne, of Cirencester, in Gloucestershire, and is said to have been baptized there on 18 November 1568. He made his life in Gloucester, in the parish of St Nicholas^W, where he practiced as a surgeon. He was styled a gentleman, and he served as sheriff of the City of Gloucester.

Marriage

John Deighton and Jane Bassett married at St Nicholas, Gloucester, on 12 April 1605. Jane was a daughter of Edward Bassett, a gentleman of Uley, in Gloucestershire, and his wife Isabel Lygon. 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. John outlived her by nine years. He made his will on 30 January 1639, died at Gloucester on 16 May 1640, and the will was proved five days later, on 21 May. The couple were buried in the south aisle of St Nicholas church, and their gravestone is said to have recorded that he “spent all his time in the study of” surgery, and “attained to great knowledge therein.”

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

John’s baptism, parents, trade, office, marriage, children, will and burial, and the daughters’ marriages, are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition, vol. 1, pp. 635–636, in the account of Jane Bassett’s family, 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. An online family tree gives his birth on the day of the baptism and his death at Gloucester; Richardson gives the date of death but no place.

The gravestone

The inscription, as Richardson prints it, read: “Here lie interred the bodies of John Deighton, of this city, gent. and Jane his wife, daughter to Edward Basset, of Uley, Esq., by whom he had issue three sons and four daughters.” Where this account says surgery, the printed inscription uses an older word for it. The stone counts seven children; Richardson names eight, three sons (John, a second John, and Thomas) and five daughters (Jane, Frances, Katherine, Damaris and Mary).

Dates

Richardson gives the will’s date as 30 January 1639. Under the Old Style^W calendar, when the year began on 25 March, a January date written 1639 falls in what is now counted as 1640; Richardson does not say which reckoning he uses. He gives Katherine’s baptism as 16 January 1614/5, that is, 1615 in modern reckoning.

The name

Richardson spells the family name Deighton throughout. 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.