♀Margery Baldock

Margery Baldock (buried 4 February 1611) was a woman of the parish of Brenchley, in Kent, the wife and then for more than eleven years the widow of Clement Forman, and the grandmother of the George Lewis who went to Plymouth Colony^W in the 1630s. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Dennys Forman (1579–1626).

Marriage and children

Clement Forman and Margery Baldock were married at Lamberhurst on 16 February 1567/8. Three daughters were christened at Brenchley: Frances in 1573, Mary on 23 May 1574 and Dennys on 16 August 1579. Frances died in 1573, the year she was christened, and Mary was buried on 13 February 1588, at thirteen. Dennys is said to have been their only surviving child. She married George Lewes, and their first child, Margery, was christened at Brenchley in December 1597.

Widowhood

Clement was buried at Brenchley on 11 November 1599. His will is said to have made Margery his executrix and left her his house and land for her life, after which they were to go to their granddaughter Margery Lewes.

Margery made her own will on 6 May 1610, as the widow Margery Forman of Brenchley. It is said to have left land to her daughter Dennys for life and then to Dennys’s sons George, James and John Lewes, to have named her two sisters, Elizabeth, the wife of Thomas Kitchingham, and Mary, the wife of Stephen Burt, and to have made her son-in-law George Lewes her executor. She was buried at Brenchley on 4 February 1611, and her will was proved in the Consistory Court of Rochester^W on 20 February 1611/12.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Dennys Forman and Dennys’s son George Lewis (died about 1663), George’s son James Lewis (1631–1713) and James’s daughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Clement Forman and Margery Baldock. From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

Sources

The marriage, written “Clement Forman & Margery Baldock”, is in the printed register of Lamberhurst marriages from 1564. The christenings and burials of the three daughters and Margery’s own burial, written Margery Forman, are from an index of the Brenchley parish registers. Her will (dated 6 May 1610, proved 20 February 1611/12) and her husband’s are known from a typescript Lewis genealogy that cites Robert S. Wakefield’s article in The American Genealogist, volume 68 (1993); a second compiled genealogy, David Curtis Dearborn’s Ancestors of David Richard Gergen and Anne Elizabeth Wilson, gives the same dates. The terms of the bequests come from a set of typed abstracts of the family’s wills, which date her will 5 May and its proving 28 February. That Dennys was the only surviving child rests on the two wills as abstracted, both of which name her as the only living child.

The year of her burial

The index gives her burial as 4 February 1611. Elsewhere the same index writes a January burial of 1625/6 as 1626, so the entry may stand for 4 February 1610/11 or for 4 February 1611/12. Her will was proved on 20 February 1611/12, which makes the later year the more likely: a burial two weeks before the proving.

The place of the marriage

The printed Lamberhurst register is published among the parish registers of East Sussex, Lamberhurst having then been counted a Sussex parish. This page places the marriage at Lamberhurst, Kent, the county where the parish lies today.

Her family

Her parents are not known.