Rich Rewards

Anthony Adolph explains how he tracked down his own gateway ancestor, and found her final resting place in Yorkshire

Recently, I travelled to Yorkshire to visit a ‘gateway ancestor’ of mine. My grandmother’s great great grandfather was Perry Nursey (1771–1840), a country surgeon turned landscape gardener and landscape painter in Little Bealings near Woodbridge, Suffolk. I have spent years discovering ever more about his artistic connections to other more famous local artists, including Churchyard and Constable. In parallel, I have enjoyed tracing his ancestry, especially through his mother, Catherine Nursey née Fairfax. A cousin of mine has a beautiful miniature of her, not aristocratic but clearly not poor either – her husband was a surgeon and her father was a draper – and her surname hinted at aristocratic connections, because several Fairfaxes appear in Burke’s publications, with titles. So back I traced her line, to a parchment-maker in Elizabethan Norwich. Then, thanks to the East Anglian pedigrees collected by Rev Matthias Candler (1604– 1663), preserved as Harleian Manuscript 6071 in the British Library, I proved that the parchment-maker’s father was a younger son of Sir Thomas Fairfax of Gilling Castle, Yorkshire, and his wife Anne Gascoigne. Her family were from Gawthorpe, Yorkshire, and her ancestors lie buried nearby in

All Saints’ Church, Harewood, which we visited. In the dark interior we found a row of alabaster tombs, including Anne’s parents, Sir William Gascoigne and his wife Lady Margaret Percy. I was able, then, to gaze on the effigy of a true gateway ancestor, for her father was the 3rd Earl of Northumberland, and his pedigree, easily traceable through Ruvigny and Burke, goes back to Edward III.