Page expanded 13 December 2020 and updated 20 December
This draws on work by Alison France and Lynne Hall (website) and where I haven't indicated my source it is probably them.
Samuel and Agnes DENNISON of Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire (now part of Cumbria) baptised (based on FamilySearch results) the following children:
Esther, 13 August 1682
William, 6 October 1684
John, 6 March 1686/7
Agnes, 2 June 1689
Jane, 25 January 1690/1
Mary, 19 February 1692/3
Ellen, 16 May 1695
According to another researcher, Sue Tiplady, who I have since lost touch with, Mary went on to marry Thomas RIGG and live in Colton and Ulverstone, not far from Dalton. They had at least five children. She made her will as a widow in 1749 and it was proved the following year indicating that she had died.
For Esther, see below
Esther DENNISON married a yeoman called Edmund PETTY when she was only about 17. They married on 1 October 1699 (according to FamilySearch, but with no parish given I would like to find a clearer record). Until 1700 Edmund lived at Holmbank in the parish of Urswick, Lancashire (not far from Dalton-in-Furness) and he lived either with or near his widowed mother, Jane.
Esther and Edmund had two sons:
William baptised 6 April 1701
Edmund baptised 14 March 1702/3.
However, Edmund the father had died (buried 19 December 1702), leaving Esther a pregnant widow at 20.
These families had property and had business as well as social contacts with each other, and I have found a number of records of property transfers and suchlike relating to their dealings and entanglements over the years. In 1700, Edmund bought a property called Wellhouse, plus a corn mill and 11 acres called Boon Woods, all at Bardsey in the parish of Urswick, from his mother for £300. The transaction was witnessed by Richard SWAINSON (the local vicar), Samuel DENNISON (I suppose Esther's father) and John WOOD. I think that Edmund and Esther then lived at this property with their son.
There was a further transfer of a house and a little land in the manor of Muchland to the Reverend Swainson and his successors as vicars of Urswick to maintain a preaching minister. It was described as a surrender and there is no purchase price mentioned, but there is a rent, so I'm not sure if this means it was a gift valued by rent, or a rental agreement. I guess a gift, because of the mention of the charitable purpose. The record is dated 4 March 1702/3, by which date I believe Edmund had already died, but this is not noted in the document title or description.
Edmund left his widow a moiety (an equal share, which I think would have been a half-share, with the remainder to their young son William) of Wellhouse and the associated property. She sold this in June 1704 to Reverend Swainson for £200.
In the same month, June (on either the 2nd or the 14th - FamilySearch has contradictory entries), Esther in fact married Richard SWAINSON. She would have been aged about 22.
With Richard SWAINSON, Esther had further children, which I think were
Bernard/Leonard baptised Urswick 20 February 1704
Samuel baptised Urswick 5 July 1707
Jane perhaps around 1709-10
Mary baptised Urswick 5, 21 or 25 May 1712
Esther baptised Hawkshead (see below) 13 or 15 September 1714
FamilySearch indexes baptisms for both Bernard and Leonard on the same date. I am not sure whether this is two different readings by transcribers of a single name or twins baptised together. Both occur in later documents transcribed presumably independently. I should look at the actual register. The youngest two girls have miultiple FamilySearch entries with different transcribed dates. Jane's baptism doesn't show up in FamilySearch, but I have found reference to her in a legal document (see below 1722) as a child of Richard, mentioned after Samuel but before Mary and Esther, so I have inserted her in that position with a guesstimate of birth date.
While Esther was married to Richard, there was some dispute about the will of her first husband. There is a fragment of a 1707/8 document in the Cumbria Archive at Barrow, described as 'Award of [three named men], arbitrators in dispute between William Petty, eldest son and heir of Edmond Petty, late of Wellhouse, deceased, Richard Swainson, clerk, and Jane Petty, widow [presumably Edmund's mother], concerning the will of the late Edmond Petty'. I don't know the nature of the dispute or how it was resolved. Or whether it was really resolved, given the documents below...
Edmund PETTY, William's younger brother, acquired in 1709 from his grandmother Jane 3 acres of land held by customary tenancy (which I think by this date was an advantageous tenure at a fixed rent) from the lord of the manor of Bardsea. A document records the alienation fine payable by Edmund, and also a small sum paid by Mr SWAINSON (presumably Richard). It may be possible that this transfer was connected to the recent dispute over the will, or it may simply have been that as Edmund grew older he was being set up with property.
In 1714, Richard took up the living of Hawkshead (to the west of Windermere, north of Urswick in the Lake District proper) and the family moved there. Their youngest child Esther was born there in that year. The family lived at Walker Ground. In 1715, Richard legally adopted his stepson William PETTY, who would by this time have been about 14.
In 1719 (the burial record is incompletely transcribed on FamilySearch but with the figure 9 and the letters emb it would have been November or December) Richard died - he was about 45, Esther about 37, William and Edmund would have been in their late teens, and Esther and Richard's own children from about 15 down to 5.
Esther and presumably the children seem to have remained in Hawkshead and in 1722 (on 12 May) she remarried, to Edward SATTERTHWAITE, a shoemaker of Hawkshead. As she had with Richard, Esther had a day or two earlier sold Edward in 1722 her share in the Wellhouse, Bardsey Mill and Boon Woods for £200.
Later that year (in December 1722) Edward, and Samuel DENNISON of Newton in Furness (presumably Esther's father or maybe another relative), made an agreement with William PETTY of Nuby Bridge in the parish of Cartmel (presumably Esther's eldest son) by which Edward would convey this moiety to William (possibly thereby giving William sole title to this property, his inheritance and perhaps his home, for the first time). Another element of the agreement was that Edward and Samuel would cause Bernard SWAINSON (Esther's eldest with Richard) to convey to William a parcel of copyhold land in the manor of Muchland (it isn't clear if this is the same land gifted to Richard and his successors as vicar by the elder Edmund PETTY back in 1702/3; I guess not) when he reaches the age of 21. William would in return pay Edward £200 on 2 February 1722/3. William was at this date already 21, perhaps nearly 22. And Bernard was I think to reach his majority (and perhaps gain control of his inheritance) in 1725, so I think this is the date meant. There is another document of nearly the same date, a lease and release of this property by Edward and Esther to William for £200.
Just a few days later, Edward and some substantial men of the district, including another SATTERTHWAITE, entered into a bond to William PETTY to discharge the Wellhouse property from a charge placed on it by the late Richard SWAINSON for payment to his children Samuel, Jane, Mary and Esther. I guess this was a term of Richard's will requiring his heir in real estate to look after his other heirs by paying cash, which obligation was now being taken on by Edward (the children's new step-father) and his co-signatories. I am grateful to this document as my first evidence for the existence of Jane, but I have no information on her or her sister Mary later than this.
Esther's eldest William PETTY must have married around this time, to Alice. There's a potential record in June 1722 in Lyth, Westmorland, between William PETTY and Alice ROBINSON. However, some time between 1722 and 1725 William died. There's a likely-looking burial on FamilySearch in November 1723. He would then have been about 22. It also appears that he did not leave any surviving children.
The wrangling over Wellhouse continued: there is a document of January 1724/5 which seems to relate to an agreement between Alice, William's widow, and Edmund, his brother and heir, relating to a case against Edmund and William's half-brother Bernard SWAINSON, who is refusing to surrender his title to some land at Wellhouse. Alice assigns her share in Wellhouse to Edmund, and authorises Edmund to claim in her name but keep for himself any legal costs he can recover from Bernard, which to me suggests that the laying out of the costs to begin with would fall to Edmund (who is now of age, about 22) and Alice is largely getting out of the case. And who can blame her?
Bernard, I am told, served an apprenticeship at law in Penrith (on the north-eastern side of the Lake District) and became an attorney in Whitehaven (on the west Cumberland coast). He died in 1746, probably aged about 40, without issue. We think he had married a Frances, and she died later the same year.
Samuel married a Catherine DONALD in the parish of St Bees in 1734; they lived in the port of Whitehaven on the west Cumberland coast and had descedants. If Esther his mother lived as long as we think she did she would have had several great-grandchildren in Whitehaven before she died. Their story is told on the Swainson page.
Esther junior obtained in 1735 a license to marry George FELL, a butcher. She is also thought to have died fairly young, in 1738 in Ulverston, possibly in childbirth as a son, Richard, was also buried few days later.
We may be able to read some sign of resolution between Esther's squabbling descendants in a later (1758) document. Edmund PETTY seems to have married a Mary and had children Thomas (1731), John (1733) and Elizabeth (1735) (dates from FamilySearch, plus I think maybe a William in 1730/1 who must have died younger, maybe 1744). Edmund returned to Ulverstone, became a woollen draper and I suppose did well for himself. He died by 1758 (there's a possible burial in 1736) and Thomas, his eldest (surviving) son and heir, was described as a gentleman. Edmund's will included Leonard SWAINSON, gent, of Whitehaven (who had also died by 1758, which slightly increases my suspicion that he may be the same person as Bernard) alongside a John STAINTON (surviving) and an Edward PETTY of Ulverstone (also deceased) as holders of the Wellhouse estate in Bardsey 'upon various specified trusts' which I infer may have included provision for the younger PETTY children. Thomas gave money (totalling over £450) to John and Elizabeth, and to his mother Mary who had by 1758 remarried, and the surviving trustee John STAINTON released the Wellhouse estate to him.
There is a burial of Edward SATTERTHWAITE in Hawkshead in 1743 (which one version of the index entry on FamilySearch notes as an infant), and another death there in 1761 (which seems to match a burial a few days later in Swarthmore, suggesting that this Edward had been a Quaker). Neither of these is confirmed as Esther's husband.
Although she buried at least two husbands and at least four adult children, I am told Esther herself lived a long life, in Hawkshead. There is a burial there of Esther SATTERTHWAITE on 10 September 1771, when she would have been nearly 90.
There is one more PETTY/SWAINSON document I found in the Cumbria archive index, which clearly relates to the PETTYs of Wellhouse, but the SWAINSON involvement may be coincidental. There is a marriage settlement of 1853, involving a Reverend Frederick HOCKIN of Phillack in Cornwall (the groom?), a Susan Ann PETTY of Wellhouse (the bride?) and a George SWAINSON of Liverpool, Merchant and a John HOCKIN of London (the groom's father or respected relative, and someone in a similar position for the bride?), witnessed by T Edmund PETTY and Lucy PETTY of Wellhouse.
If you are interested in this line I'll be very pleased indeed to hear from you. Email me at deletethis.ianwilliamson161@gmail.com but delete everything up to and including the first dot, leaving just my name and number @ service provider. Please do not delete the automatically-generated subject line, so that I know your email is not spam. You can add more to the subject if you like but if you delete what appears I may not read your mail.