Letters

Paul Chapman wrote from Cornwall seeking further information: his ancestor Penelope Blencowe, baptised in Mixbury in 1795, had married Thomas Summers there in 1816. I was able to take him back two more generations to William and Ann Blencowe who had baptised six children in Mixbury. The late James Blencowe of Painted Post NY had suggested that William had moved to Gawcott and died there in 1819. This would have linked the Mixbury family to the Blencowes of NY State and the Blencowes of Wisconsin. I told Paul that this was most unlikely and that William probably came from the same branch of the family as the Blincoes who emigrated from Mixbury to Elora in Ontario. I also told him that he certainly shared ancestors with Frank Whelans of Melbourne, Australia.

Bridget Fisher has been making progress with her researches into the Blincos of Suffolk. In correspondence with Joy Johnson in Australia they have traced male descendants of the line “down under”.

This is important; the first records of Suffolk family had no obvious connections with either the Cumbrian or Marston St Lawrence lines, and they were located at a distance from other family branches. There is a possibility that they started as nick-named ‘Blinkers’ and metamorphosed into Blincos. The line has ‘daughtered out’ in England; a DNA test of an Australian male might show a direct link.

I have had interesting correspondence with Thomas Grindley in Maryland; he and Robin Kirk in the Netherlands are researching the Tolson family. John and Dorothy Tolson were mentioned as ‘nephew’ and ‘niece’ in Anthony Blencowe's will ( John Tolson followed Anthony as Provost of Oriel College a year or so after Anthony's death in 1618). Jill Dudbridge and I had assumed that the Tolson connection was through Anthony's sister-in-law Apollonia Tolson who had married his brother Richard and that John and Dorothy were her actual nephew and niece. Thomas suggested that John and Dorothy's father Henry had married a sister of Anthony named Joan. He has also come up with further records of Christopher Blencowe, another son of Anthony Blencowe and Winifred Dudley, whom we had thought to have been unmarried. Christopher had been settled in Bromfield (Cumbria) with a wife Magdaline; of their five children Chirstopher, Leonard, Janet, Elizabeth and Thomas, the last four had already appeared in apprentice records and will documents in London. Margaret Rampston had also mentioned Tolsons and Blencowes as her nephews and nieces; Thomas points out that one of the witnesses of her will was a Barwys a prominent family in Bromfield. This is all very complicated and I don't expect you to follow it all! Take a look at the family trees in your copies of our Blencowe Book and see if you can puzzle it out!