♀Rose Rysse

Rose Rysse (died 1613) was a woman of Caston, in Norfolk, England, who married the yeoman Edward Gilman and after his death in 1573 was charged by his will with bringing up their ten children on his lands. Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) descends from her by five separate lines of descent, all of them through her son Edward Gilman (baptized 1557): Rose was her tenth great-grandmother by one line and her eleventh great-grandmother by the other four.

Marriages

On 21 June 1550 Edward Gilman married Rose Rysse at Caston, a parish about five miles from Hingham. Over the next twenty-three years they had ten children: Margaret, Katherine, John, Edward, Robert, Lawrence, Rose, Joan, Elizabeth and Olive. All but John, who seems to have been the eldest son, were baptized at Caston.

Edward made his will on 5 February 1572/3^W, when none of the children was married, and named Rose his executrix. He left her all his houses and lands in Caston for ten years, to pay his debts and legacies and to bring up the children, and after that, for her life, the mansion house they lived in with the lands in Southgate and the wheat field, which were then to pass to their son John. John was also to let his mother occupy the copyhold^W lands at Saham Toney for her life. Edward died within months, and the will was proved on 7 July 1573. Their youngest child, Olive, was born after his death and baptized at Caston on 21 November 1573.

Five years later, on 3 April 1578, Rose married John Snell at Caston. She was buried there as Rose Snell on 3 October 1613, forty years after her first husband’s death.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard’s five lines of descent from Edward Gilman and Rose Rysse all run through their son Edward Gilman (baptized 1557), and all five come down her father’s side, the nearest twelve generations up. All of them rest on a link that is probable rather than recorded: that this Edward was the Edward Gilman of Hingham, father of Edward Gilman (about 1587–1655), who took his family to New England in 1638. The lines come together again in Elizabeth Gilman (1727–1806), in her son Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and in Nathaniel’s daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Sources

Her marriages, her burial and the baptisms of her children are from the Caston parish register as printed by Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Abel Lunt (1963), pp. 153–156, from copies made by Major Cecil Gurney and Col. Charles E. Banks; the will is from Davis’s abstract (Archdeaconry Court of Norwich, 1573, no. 158). Constance Le Neve Gilman Ames, The Story of the Gilmans (1950), gives the first marriage day variously as 12, 21 and 22 June 1550, and says only that the widow “remarried in 1578”; Davis has 21 June 1550 and 3 April 1578.

Her family

Her parents are not known. One of the witnesses to Edward’s will was a Lawrence Reyse; Davis does not say whether he was a kinsman of hers.