Unknown (Unknown) Downing (abt. 1555)

Descendants

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Correct information on the wife of this George Downing

The wife of George Downing and mother of Honorable Emanuel Downing is erroneously reported as either Dorcas Bellamy or Dorcas Blois on several Internet sites. This is incorrect on both counts. Dorcas Blois was wife of a George Downing who was his distant cousin of this George. See TAG 74:166:

• GEORGE(B) DOWNING (George(C)), b. say 1552; named as under 25 in his father's 1561 will; m. ___ (BELLAMY?).

George (B) Downing's wife and mother of the New England immigrants may have been a Bellamy but the evidence is not in any way sufficient to prove it. It would be better to represent her as unknown. His wife was buried, as "Wife of George Downing," in the same parish on 21 December 1610.

There was no such person as "Dorcas Blois Bellamy." That name is just a complete fiction. But it is a perfect example of how internet sites conflate two people to fill a void of information.

A complete genealogy of the Downing family was published in

Hyde, Myrtle Stevens, “A Study of the Downing Family in England, with Connections in Early New England” in The American Genealogist. (New Haven, CT: D. L. Jacobus: 1999) 74:161-169, 299-308, 76:137

Sources

Additional data on her and her family can be found in:

1. W. Bruce Bannerman and Major W. Bruce Bannerman, eds., The Registers of St. Stephen's Walbrook, ... London, Harleian Soc. Pubs., Register Section, 49(London, 1919):90
2. George Minns, transc., Badwell Ash parish registers.
3. St. Lawrence, Ipswich, parish registers, Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, searched by Prudence Rodwell.
4. Salem Church Records 7;
5. Massachusetts Bay Colony Records 1:375;
6. Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families, Mainly of the Connecticut River Valley (Hartford 1952; rpt. Baltimore 1978) 514;
7. NEHGR 115:151;
8. The Essex Genealogist 30:90-93, 125-32, 171-76
9. Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America: Life-stories from early New England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2013) 90-95.
10. Joseph James Muskett, Suffolk Manorial Families, 3 vols. (Exeter 1900) 1:96-99
11. Mary Walton Ferris, Dawes-Gates Ancestral Lines, 2 vols. (n.p., 1943, 1931) 1:315-18
12. MHSC 6: 85; 5; 8: 215;
13. Frances D. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland 1651-1660 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979), 185; CC s.n. George Downing;
14. Winthrop's Papers and Journal: WP V, 5-8, 14; WJ 538n; WP V, 21-2, 38-9, 154, 230; WP VI, 97, 184-5, 248.WP V, 5-8, 14; WJ 538n; WP IV, 358, 371-2, 396; WP IV, 500, 501; WP II, III, passim; WJ 47, 88, 136, 293; WP IV, 70-1;
15. Hugh Peter 1598-1660 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 164; # The Weld-Peter mission to England', Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 32 (1937), 193-4n.;
16. E.D. Hartley, Ironworks on the Saugus (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 55; Sibley, 29n.;
17. The Great Migration Begins 578-81.
18. N.C.P. Tyack, 'Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660' (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1951), xcv;
19. Salem CR, 7;
20. Salem TR, 5, 180;
21. R.P. Stearns; Emanuel Downing, in Lundy, Darryl. The Peerage: A genealogical survey of the peerage of Britain as well as the royal families of Europe.
22. R.P. Stearns, 'Weld-Peter mission', 217;
23. R.P. Stearns, The strenuous puritan: