The
Ansty Family
Saints
or Sinners?
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When I first found out that my ancestor Thomas ANSTY was a
cleric, I imagined him a model of piety. There he was, listed in Alumni
Oxonienses, matriculating in July 1579. The same entry told me he was a
good Dorset boy, of plebeian stock, but by 1592 he was rector of Witchampton.
He married one Avis BRADSTOCKE, daughter of a family sufficiently respectable
to be listed in the 1623 Visitation of Dorset. And Thomas’s will (1612) was
further evidence of his benevolent nature, bequeathing money, wheat and
barley to the poor at Witchampton and Hampreston.
Avis settled in Hampreston
after Thomas’s death, where she was no doubt a ray of sunshine in the lives
of her churchwarden son Nicholas and his bride Dorothy DUGDALE, daughter of
... wait for it ... yet another vicar. Nicholas and Dorothy’s son Daniel was so
virtuous he didn’t even father a child until he was in his sixties. And
that’s where the ANSTYs begin to lose their saintly reputation... That child, Mary, married
William OKELY at Blandford St Mary in 1725/6. Now, Blandford St Mary seems to
have been one of those parishes where clandestine or irregular marriages took
place. And a marriage settlement was drawn up six weeks after the
wedding. Hmmmmmm! Did William and Mary run
off together, with the settlement drawn up afterwards in an attempt to
regularise the affair? Certainly, William’s family, although describing
themselves as gentlemen, seem to have had one or two shady connections. The
family tomb, in Kinson churchyard, is believed to have been used to conceal
smuggled contraband. And when William and Mary’s daughter Molly wrote her
will in 1795, she made Isaac GULLIVER of Long Critchel a trustee of her
estate. He’s described as a merchant in the will, but is better known in
Dorset lore as the county’s most famous smuggler ... If you have any comments to make on
the information of this page, please e-mail me by clicking here. © D. M. Watton, 2001 |
