♂William Mering

William Mering was an Englishman remembered as the father of Margaret Mering, the wife of Thomas Basset of Brailsford in Derbyshire. He was the eighteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Margaret Mering. Through Margaret he was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Margaret is said to have been his daughter. She married Thomas Basset of Brailsford, and their daughter, Joan Basset, was her father’s heir and became the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire. The records do not give William’s dates, his wife or his home; his granddaughter’s marriage places him most likely in the fourteenth century.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Margaret Mering, her daughter Joan Basset, Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483) and, generations later, Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653). One comes down to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

His daughter and his era

William is known from a single compiled source: F. N. Craig, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 243, makes Joan Basset the daughter and heir of Thomas Basset of Brailsford by Margaret, daughter of William Mering. Craig does not identify William further. His era follows from his granddaughter’s marriage: Joan’s husband, Sir Ralph Shirley, succeeded his father, who was killed in 1403. The two William Merings of the printed fifteenth-century records, one who died in 1449 and one whose will is dated that year, lived a generation too late to be Margaret’s father.