That Missing Heir!

In Appendix VII of our Blencowe Book Jean Imbery wrote of ‘The tale of the missing heir’. In brief, the story was that, when Sir John (Judge) Blencowe died at Marston St Lawrence in 1726, he was succeeded by his eldest son, also John. He died in 1740 and the property passed to his son, again John, who died unmarried in 1777. By an indenture of 18 October 1745 John broke the entail and made his nephew Samuel Jackson his heir. Samuel Jackson assumed the family name and inherited the property.

However, John who died in 1777 had not been the eldest son; a son Thomas had been born a year earlier. Thomas had died at the age of twenty, presumably unmarried, in 1739.

Years later Jean's great aunt Anne Tait Macleod (nee Hooper) and her grandmother Rose Ellen Raisbeck believed that their grandfather, Thomas Blencowe, was descended from an unrecorded great grandson of Sir John Blencowe (1642-1726).

The strongly-held family tradition was that Thomas, who would have been under-age, had married a dairy maid and that his family had refused to recognise the marriage. Thomas, the supposed son of the marriage, had married a Mary Webb whose son, another Thomas (1791-1857) had married Elizabeth Pressman in 1813 and produced yet another Thomas (1814-1871), the grandfather of Mrs Tait McLeod and Mrs Raisbeck. There were holes in the story (there seemed to be a generation missing after the first of the four Thomases) but Mrs Tait McCleod was convinced of its truth and searched every possible record she could find, even including those at the blacksmith's shop at Gretna Green in Scotland; the romantic destination of eloping couples in those days. She firmly believed that her family should have inherited the Manor of Marston St Lawrence, and that's where the story stood when the book went press six years ago.

The new development came from Joan Harrison, a grand-daughter of Mrs Tait McCleod:

“Well, at last I have found ‘my’ Thomas in the 1851 Census, living in Walthamstow (as my grandmother had said). He gave his age as 59 and born in Helmdon, Northants (around 1792). As this is near Brackley, I thought that maybe he was from the same family as Jill Dudbridge, but on further investigation I also found another Thomas Blencowe born in 1791 at Croughton, which is on the other side of Brackley. Do you have records of these two families?”

This proved to be easy, a Thomas Blencowe was baptised at Helmdon on June 9 1792, the son of Nathaniel Blencowe and Jenny Hiron, a descendant of the family of stonemasons. It was known that Thomas had married Elizabeth Pressman and Joan was able to confirm that the Census recorded his wife as Elizabeth born c. 1790 in Bethnal Green.

So, that makes it pretty clear that Thomas was not of the family of Marston St Lawrence but of the same group as Mike Walton's ancestors and probably connected to the Blencoes of Wisconsin; pity we can't do a DNA! It's a shame to put an end to the dairy maid story, but facts are facts.

A warning of transcription errors: family records reported that Thomas had died 1871 of Erysipelas - an unlikely cause of terminal illness. Joan had obtained a copy of the death certificate showed it to have been ‘general paralysis’, presumably a stroke.