X61 Y 88 W 528 H 33
Gotts Surname Family History
123 - William of Ixworth Thorpe - 3
The will of William 4812 Gotts of Ixworth Thorpe
There is another Gotts will in Bury St Edmonds Archive, that of William Gotts who died in 1747 at Ixworth Thorpe. This is about 6 miles North-East of Timworth, all of which is agricultural land.
From the will we can identify:
- Sarah is William’s wife, probably Sarah nee Clarke whom he married in 1731 in Fornham All Saints, 4 miles Southwest of Timworth (40 pounds) and various items of silver and furniture marked with her maiden name
- Son George 4823 (30 pounds)
- Son Samuel 4817 (25 pounds)
- Son Philip 4819 (25 pounds)
- Son Robert 4818 (20 pounds)
- Son William 4814 (20 pounds)
- Daughter Susan 4821(15 pounds)
- Daughter Martha 4822 (15 pounds)
- Daughter Mary 4820 (10 pounds)
- Son John 3921 (20 Shillings ((one pound)) (Marr Mary Whitmore then Elizabeth Denton)
This list is in order of size of bequest, assuming that older children get more. However, it is possible that some have already been provided for, eg John at the time of his marriage.
What is striking is the number of matching points in Sarah Teague’s affidavit:
a John, a George, a Samuel, their mother being Sarah. Also it is only about 6 miles away in sparsely populated land. Neither the order of appearance in the will nor the value matches the John/George/Samuel order in Sarah’s, but until we find their baptisms we can’t confirm the order.
There is also an uncle Philip referenced in Elizabeth Denton’s will: that could be Philip Gotts, or a Philip Denton on Elizabeth’s side.
What we haven’t been able to do yet is find the baptisms of all these children, because that will better show us the order of the children and whether they survived. All we can say at this point is that the people listed in the will were born after William Gotts married Sarah Clarke in 1731 and were alive in 1741 when the will was made.
Going back to Sarah Teague’s affidavit, there is a second tree attached to the back listing the Wiseman children and the Georges and Susannah Gottses.
Awkward to work it out, but it says that Susannah was baptised at Northwold in 1760, and the only Northwold is in Norfolk. The Norfolk Baptisms show that George & Susannah Hayward’s son George Gotts was baptised in Northwold in 1760, but there is no sign of Susannah’s baptism. I suspect that Sarah mistakenly remembered the wrong person’s baptism in 1760, ie George’s instead of Susannah’s.