♀Mary Wilkinson

Mary Wilkinson was a daughter of Thomas W. Wilkinson (1767–1840) and Agnes Airey, who married at Sedbergh, Yorkshire, in 1792. She was the half-second great-grand-aunt of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the half-sister of Nancy Jane’s second great-grandfather William Robert Wilkinson (1816–1886).

Family

Her parents married by banns at Sedbergh on 29 May 1792. An index of the Sedbergh baptisms gives three children for the marriage: Robert in 1792, Mary in 1794 and Ann in 1796. A county history places the family at Hole House, in the chapelry of Howgill, where Thomas farmed. After 1796 the indexed baptisms stop for eight years, and a memorial compilation gives Thomas’s second marriage, to Ann Rae, as 31 October 1802. That marriage produced a large family, so Mary had many half-brothers and half-sisters. A county history of 1883 says her brother Robert went to Jamaica in 1820 and died there, and that her sister Ann died without children.

The same history says that Mary married James Mattison and had four children. No date or place for the marriage is recorded, and the children are not named. Her father emigrated to America in 1830 with his second wife and nine of their children, and the family reached Illinois only in 1837.

Notes

Her mother’s name

The county history names the mother of Robert, Ann and Mary as Mary Wilson, the name it also gives to Thomas’s own mother. The Sedbergh marriage register names the bride of 1792 as Agnes Airey.

Her dates

No birth or death date is known for Mary. An index that extracts the printed transcript of the Sedbergh register, not the register itself, gives the baptism year as 1794.