I have been working on my family tree and have come across either a William Morris or a William Norris who married a Lady Joane de Vere who was the dau of Elizabeth Howard and a John Devere th3e 12th earl of oxford.
I would like to clarify if it is Morris or Norris.
one would make the Howards and Bolyns part, a very removed part, of the family tree and of course one would not.
it appears that the Morris bloodline split between Church of England and Quaker. and came to America early on to escape religious persecutions.
This line also married into the Shattuck line which helped with others to start the Quaker Church in the North Carolina area.
I would appreciate any help that can be given. It has been a lonely search because none of the family is interested and my father never talked about his family to me, the youngest child. My grandmother, his mom, never did either.
thank you
Hi - Do you have any dates? This will make research easier.
ReplyDeleteHi Mary Lou,
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if this will be of any help. I see from notes I made some time ago on the early Howards that the Elizabeth Howard/ John de Vere marriage caused problems because she took with her part of the family fortune that should have gone to her uncles. Although the Howards would eventually come into the Mowbray inheritance and the dukedom of Norfolk, that could not have been foreseen at the time. This is an extract from the book I was writing,
‘The Sir John Howard who died in 1437 had, by his first wife, a son, also Sir John, who died in his father’s lifetime. In 1429 this younger John’s daughter Elizabeth married John de Vere, Earl of Oxford and “carried away most of the Howard estates” leaving her grandfather’s two other sons, Sir Robert and Henry, born to his second wife, Alice Tendring, with a greatly reduced inheritance. The brother Henry is, I am informed, an ancestor of Walter Elias (Walt) Disney (d’Isney), but as yet I have not worked on this line myself.’
It was Sir Robert who married Margaret Mowbray, a daughter of the disgraced Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, and whose son John Howard inherited the title in the reign of Richard III.
It’s a few years since I did this but it looks as if the references came from ‘Complete Peerage’ and ‘Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage’, so should be fairly reliable. The generations are:
Elizabeth Howard m. John de Vere (1429)
Joane de Vere m. Sir William Norreys
Sir Edward Norreys m. Frieswide Lovell, daughter of Lord Lovell
Sir John (left no heir). His brother Henry Norreys was executed 17th May 1536 for alleged adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn.
Henry Norreys had married Mary Fiennes and had a son called Henry, born in the 1520’s, who was created 1st Lord Norris by Queen Elizabeth I in 1572 and died in 1601.
This is as far as it goes. I’ll see if I can dig out anything else but my interest is in the earlier history of the Howards, so I doubt I can.
Hope it helps.