Mary stanes Fearnley

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Stanes Fearnley (1661–1750), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth at Bradford, Yorkshire, her marriage to Richard Hodgson, her son James Hodgson, her long life in Sedbergh, and the broader context of late-Stuart and Georgian Yorkshire.

Mary Stanes Fearnley (1661–1750) was born on the third of November, 1661, and baptized at St Peter's, the parish church now known as Bradford Cathedral, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Her birth fell within the first full year of the Restoration, only months after the coronation of King Charles II, in a Yorkshire still recovering from the upheavals of civil war and commonwealth. Bradford in that era was a modest market and clothing town, its prosperity tied to the woollen trade for which the West Riding had become widely known.

In the course of her life Mary was united in marriage to Richard Hodgson, rendered in the Latin parish records as Richardi Hodgson, after the custom of clerks of that period. Of this union there is preserved the record of a son, James Hodgson, born in 1690 and living until 1766, through whom the Hodgson line descends into the compiler's paternal-grandfather branch.

Mary's later years were passed in Sedbergh, then numbered among the parishes of Yorkshire, a remote dales town set among the fells of the western edge of the county. There, about the year 1750, she ended a life that had spanned nearly nine decades — an extraordinary length of days for any woman of her century, and one that carried her from the reign of Charles II through those of James II, William and Mary, Anne, and the first two Georges. She would have known England's union with Scotland in 1707 and the long Hanoverian settlement that followed.

Though the documentary record of Mary's daily life is slender, as is so often the case for women of her generation in the parish books of rural England, the survival of her baptismal and burial dates, her husband's name, and the issue of her marriage testifies to her place in the family's enduring memory. Mary was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.