♂Mark White

Mark White was a man of Timsbury and Leckford, in Hampshire, England, and the great-grandfather of John White^W, the Dorchester minister who helped to obtain the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John White (buried 1 February 1579/80).

Mark is said to have been a brother of Dr John White^W, the Bishop of Winchester, who died in 1560. The line to the Dorchester minister ran through Mark’s second son, John, who lived at Timsbury, married Mildred Weston and outlived her. Their eldest son, another John, settled as a gentleman at Stanton St John, in Oxfordshire, and was the minister’s father.

Notes

Sources

Mark White is known only from Michael Russell’s compiled pages on the White family for the Dorset online parish clerks. In a note to his life of the Rev. John White of Dorchester, Russell makes the minister’s father “the grandson of Mark White of Timsbury and Leckford in Hampshire who was the brother of Dr John White (1511-1560)”, and traces the descent “through Mark’s second son John White of Timsbury”. Russell names that Dr White as the Bishop of Winchester. He gives no wife and no dates for Mark himself. The burials of Mark’s son John on 1 February 1579/80 and of John’s wife Mildred on 8 January 1567 come from the same pages.

Brother or uncle

Russell’s note on the marriage settlement of Mark’s granddaughter Avis, drawn from Frances Rose-Troup’s 1930 book on the Dorchester minister, calls Dr White the uncle of Avis and of her brother John. Taken at its word, that would make the bishop a son of Mark rather than his brother. The two statements do not agree, and neither is a record.

Not used

An online family tree names the parents of John White of Timsbury as Marcus White and a wife Margaret. It cites no sources, and the wife’s name is not used here.