♀Margaret Mering

Margaret Mering was an Englishwoman of the later fourteenth century who married Thomas Basset of Brailsford in Derbyshire; their daughter, Joan Basset, was his heir. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Joan Basset. Through Joan she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Marriage

Thomas Basset married Margaret Mering, said to have been the daughter of William Mering. Her husband is said to have been a younger son of Sir John Basset of Cheadle in Staffordshire; he had inherited Brailsford from his mother, Joan Brailsford. Their daughter, Joan Basset, was her father’s heir and became the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire. The records do not give the dates of their births, their marriage or their deaths. They say nothing more of Margaret’s own family.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Joan Basset and Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483). One comes down through Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Her name and her father

Margaret is known from a single compiled source: F. N. Craig, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 243, makes Joan Basset the daughter and heir of Thomas Basset of Brailsford by Margaret, daughter of William Mering. The older pedigrees that name Thomas and his daughter, William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) and the heralds’ visitation of Sussex, do not name Joan’s mother. Craig does not identify William Mering further, and the William Mering of the printed fifteenth-century records, whose will is dated 1449, lived a generation too late to be her father.