♀Susanna Thorne

Susanna Thorne was an Englishwoman of Northamptonshire, the mother of Thomas Dudley^W, deputy governor and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Thomas Dudley (1576–1653).

Susanna was most likely christened at Yardley Hastings, Northamptonshire, on 5 March 1559; the register there writes her name “Suzanna Dorne”, and the entry names no parents. She married Roger Dudley, reportedly at Lidlington, Bedfordshire, on 8 June 1575, and their son Thomas was baptized at Yardley Hastings on 12 October 1576. Susanna’s family name, Thorne, comes from a pedigree of the Purefoy family recorded at a heraldic visitation^W, which lists a “Susanna Thorne m. Rogers”; an article in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1911 read that entry as her marriage to Roger Dudley.

A history of the Dudley family published in 1886 says that Thomas lost his father while still a small boy and was brought up by his mother’s relatives, and that Judge Augustine Nicolls^W later took him on as a clerk, “being his kinsman by the mother’s side”. When Susanna died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Thomas and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith; the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Christening, 1559

The Yardley Hastings parish register for 1550 to 1653 has, under the year 1559, the entry “Suzanna Dorne bapt 5 Martij”. The entry names no parents. The link to Susanna Thorne is an inference from three points: the name, the parish, and her father’s will. That will, proved in 1589 and known from a compiled abstract, names a daughter Susan Dudley. The year may be 1559/60 if the year then ran from Lady Day. The entry itself is on record; the link to Susanna is not.

Marriage, 1575

The FamilySearch index to England Marriages, 1538 to 1973, gives Roger Dudley and Susan Thorne married at Lidlington, Bedfordshire, on 8 June 1575. The entry comes from an index only, not from the original register.

Thomas’s baptism, 1576

The Yardley Hastings register enters the baptism as a single line, “Thomas Dudley bap 12 Octob[er]”, with no parent named, although the entries around it each name a parent. Joseph Gardner Bartlett’s 1911 article summarized it as the baptism of Thomas Dudley, son of Roger and Susanna (Thorne) Dudley. A William Dudley was also having children baptized in the parish, among them a daughter Mary in October 1580.