♂Michael Gater

Michael Gater (married 13 November 1576) was a man of Hillmorton, a Warwickshire village about two miles from Rugby, near the point where Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire meet. He married Isabel Smythe there in 1576, and Judith, his daughter, was christened there in 1588/9. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Judith Gater (christened 1588/9).

Michael Gater married Isabel Smythe at Hillmorton on 13 November 1576, a widow whose first husband, William Bailey, had been buried there on 20 June 1574. He had nine children christened at Hillmorton between 1576/7 and 1592, and Judith was the eighth. Four of the nine were buried there, three of them within two years of their christening. Judith was christened at Hillmorton on 19 March 1588/9, with Michael named as her father, and in October 1608 she married John Perkins of Hillmorton there. The Hillmorton register begins in 1564, too late to hold the baptisms of Michael and Isabel, and his parents are not known. When and where Michael died is not known either.

A suit in Chancery

In 1594 Richard Beridge and his wife Elizabeth, William Bailey’s sister, sued Michael Gater, and in his answer Gater acknowledged that William’s widow Isabel had married him. The suit was brought in the ^W. The payment in dispute was £12 that William had bound himself to pay his sister, and through his widow it had passed to her new husband. Gater denied that the terms of William’s father’s will made it due. He said that he had since paid most of the bonds to William’s siblings himself, to his own loss, because the sums he had paid were greater than the money he had received with Isabel in marriage.

Notes

Sources

The marriage, Judith’s christening and Michael’s name as her father come from Walter Goodwin Davis’s The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes (1959), which abstracts the Hillmorton parish register and notes that the register begins in 1564. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins gives Judith’s christening on 19 March 1588/9 as the “daughter of Michael Gater”. Melynie Moody’s article “Who Was Isabell Baylie?” (New England Historical and Genealogical Register 180, Winter 2026, pp. 88–93) quotes the register entries for the couple’s marriage, their children and Isabel’s burial word for word, and the 1594 Chancery pleadings. The two books differ by one day on Judith’s wedding: Davis and Moody give 9 October 1608, Anderson 8 October.

Her names

The register writes her name three ways: “Isabell Smithe” at her first marriage (9 May 1572), “Isabell Baylie” at her second (13 November 1576), and “Isabell Gater” at her burial (26 October 1617). Moody argues that Baylie was her first husband’s name, not her birth name, and standardizes her birth surname as Smythe, the form used here. Davis prints her surname as Baylie and indexes her under “Bailey, Baylie”.

John Smythe’s will

John Smythe of Hillmorton’s will of 10 December 1580 names Michael Gater as one of its overseers and leaves him a cow. The will names a daughter Elizabeth, and Moody takes her to be Isabel, which makes Isabel John Smythe’s daughter. That link is Moody’s inference, not a register entry.

The suit of 1594

Richard Beridge of Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, and his wife Elizabeth brought their complaint against Michael Gater of Hillmorton on 16 June 1594 (The National Archives, C 2/Eliz/B25/38), and Gater replied on 15 October 1594. In his answer he acknowledged that William Bailey had entered a bond of £20 to pay Elizabeth £12 when she turned 21 or married, that William had died before paying, and that William’s widow Isabel then married him. He disagreed that the terms of Richard Bailey’s will made the payment due, since William had died before his father. He said that he had since made most of the payments to William’s siblings himself, to his own loss, because the sums he had paid were greater than the money he had received in marriage to Isabel.

Ann Gater

Davis suggests that the Ann Gater who married Thomas Wright at Hillmorton on 29 July 1600 “was probably an older sister of Judith”. Davis gives no christening for her, and Moody’s list of the nine christenings has no Ann.