10. PETTY-BRADFORD

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Jack Priestley’s Family History

This site is a work-in-progress. There is a massive amount to cover. I have included both male and female lines. Keep coming back for more.
I have numbered the generations working backwards from Jack’s as (1)

 ANTHONY PETTY and ISABEL BRADFORD (10)

 

ANTHONY PETTY. We have been able to trace Anthony Petty back to the Commonwealth period under Oliver Cromwell, following the Civil War.

Baptism. Holy Trinity, Skipton
1652 Oct 24  Anthony filius John Pettie of Cauder [1]

His mother was Martha Airton, born in Rylstone, five miles north of Skipton.

Cawder Hall Farm, or Caldray House, lies just SE of Skipton town. It is close to Snaygill, where the Petyts later farmed. The Cawder line is the only Petyt branch in the Skipton area to favour the name Anthony, which appears in every generation.[2]

Anthony was the oldest of five sons. He also had an elder sister Mary, who died aged ten. The family are living at “Cauder”, for all these baptisms.

 

At the time of his marriage at 25 he was said to be of Burnsall. This is a village on the river Wharfe 10 miles NE of Skipton. In practice the distance is considerably greater, since there is no road across the intervening moor. The family may have moved there from Skipton parish, since Anthony’s brother Christopher raised his family there. But Anthony need not have lived in Burnsall village. This was a large, sprawling parish. Anthony could have lived much closer to Skipton.

Rylstone, where his mother came from, was a chapelry within the parish of Burnsall.

 

ISABEL BRADFORD. Isabel was of Skipton when she married there. We have not found her baptism in Skipton or elsewhere. We should expect Isabel to have been born around the same time as Anthony. Hosea Bradforth had children baptised in Skipton in the early 1640s. Humphrye and Thomas Bradford had children born there in the mid- to late 1650s.

 

The couple married in 1678 in the reign of Charles II.

Marriage. Holy Trinity, Skipton
1678 May 27 Anthony Petty of ye pish of Burnsall and Issabell Bradford of this pish

 

We have found only one baptism from this marriage.

Baptisms. Holy Trinity, Skipton
1695 Mar 31  Izabell Daughter of Anthony Pettit of Skirarks.

This is seventeen years after the marriage. It is highly likely that there were more children, baptised in a parish other than Skipton. The parish registers of Skipton have survived in good condition. Izabell’s is the only baptism for a child of Anthony Pettit.

It does, however, give us the information that seventeen years after the marriage the family was living at Skyrakes. This is a farm on the slopes of Flasby Fell, only a short distance west of Crookrise, where we find Anthony living at the end of his life with John Petyt, whom we presume to be his son.

View over Skyrakes [3]

 

Sometime before his death, Anthony, and presumably Isabel, moved from Skyrakes to Crookside. He was in his seventies when he died, and may no longer have been able to farm independently, so moved in with his John and his family. We do not have hard evidence that John is Anthony and Isabel’s son, but this is one of the factors pointing to that. We have not found a baptism for John. It is almost certainly one of those missing baptisms in the first seventeen years of Anthony and Isabel’s marriage.

Anthony and Isabel lived through the Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the ousting of his brother James II by William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the end of the Stuart dynasty with the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and the start of Hanoverian rule.

 

Burial. Holy Trinity, Skipton.
1725 Oct  Anthony Petty (Farmer) of Crookrise at 73.

His will was proved on 25 Nov 1725.

Isabel outlived him by 15 years. At the time of her death she was living at Snaygill, south of Skipton, where John’s son, John Petyt junior was farming, again pointing to a close family link. We believe her to be his grandmother.

Burial. Holy Trinity, Skipton
1741/2  Jan 20  Isabel Petyt Widow of Snaygill

She was probably in her 80s.

 

 

[1] BMDs from Yorkshire registers on Findmypast.
[2] http://www.bgwaters.co.uk/harrison6.htm
[3] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8xFcTAk-jCs/TeUwaJ9BcNI/AAAAAAAAAso/xJ6YfdjEK38/s320/KWVR+Gala+and+Burnsall+Fell+trek+091.JPG

 

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