♂John Delamere

John Delamere is said to have been the son and heir of Sir Thomas Delamere, a knight of Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, and the father of Elizabeth Delamere, through whom the Delamere inheritance passed into the Forster family. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Delamere.

John’s daughter Elizabeth was his sole heir. She married George Forster, the eldest son of Humphrey Forster of Harpsden in Oxfordshire, and George was seated at Aldermaston, the home of her grandfather Sir Thomas Delamere. His family’s arms lived on in his descendants’ shield: when the heralds recorded the Forster arms at their visitation^W of Berkshire in 1566, the Delamere coat, two silver lions on red, one above the other, collared in blue, was quartered^W with Forster and Popham. Elizabeth and George had seven sons and three daughters, and Humphrey, the eldest, followed his father as Sir Humphrey Forster of Aldermaston.

Notes

The heralds’ pedigree

John Delamere is known only from the heralds’ pedigrees of his daughter’s family. The pedigree of the Forsters of Aldermaston in the 1566 heralds’ visitation of Berkshire, as printed by W. C. Metcalfe in 1885 (page 12), gives Sir George Forster’s wife as Elizabeth, “da. and sole heir to John” Delamere, “son and heir to Sir Thomas Delamere” of Aldermaston, knight. It gives no dates for John, does not style him a knight or give him a place of his own, and does not name his wife.

His wife

The Hampshire visitations, as printed by the Harleian Society in 1913 (volume 64, page 42), draw the same family, spelling the name Delamare, and give John Delamare a wife: a daughter, not named, of Sir Nicholas Dabridgecourt of Stratfieldsaye in Hampshire. That would make Elizabeth’s mother a Dabridgecourt; the Berkshire pedigree does not name her mother. The same chart marries Alice, a daughter of Thomas Delamare, to Thomas Dabridgecourt of Stratfieldsaye, drawn there as Sir Nicholas’s son, and calls her “d. & Coheire” of her father, which sits oddly beside the Berkshire pedigree’s John as son and heir. Neither visitation explains the difference.