Dorothy Bennett and her Ancestors

The Gibbs families of Wield, Bentworth and Chawton

Towards the end of the 18th and the middle part of the 19th centuries there was a cluster of people with the surname Gibbs living in the area between the market towns of Alton and New Alresford in central southern England. Among them was Martha Gibbs, the wife of William Smith. Martha was a great, great, grandmother of Dorothy Bennett who is the main subject of this series of web pages.

Martha married William Smith in New Alresford in July 1805 and they lived there throughout their married lives. William worked for fifty years at a coach factory in Bishop’s Sutton, a mile or two east of New Alresford on the road to Alton. Martha was born in or about the year 1783 and, although there is no surviving record of her birth, several other Gibbs’s were born in Bishop’s Sutton and Ropley, the next village to the east, at about that time, and it seems likely that she was a relative of theirs.

Better records exist of the Gibbs’s in Bentworth and Wield, two villages to the west of Alton, which are 6 miles from Ropley, and a few of them seem to have links with Ropley and Bishop’s Sutton. There seems to be no surviving proof that they were related to Martha but it is plausible that they were and, for that reason, the stories of a few of them will be outlined here.


This map shows Alton, Bentworth and Wield. Bentworth is about 4 miles from Alton. Ropley, Bishop’s Sutton, and New Alresford are to the south west, a little way beyond the edge of the map.

The area is in central southern England, about 25 miles north of the coastal towns of Portsmouth and Gosport, and 14 miles east of the city of Winchester. London is about 50 miles to the north-east.

Chawton, famous for its association with the author Jane Austen, was where John Gibbs, one of the Bentworth and Wield Gibbs’s, made his home with his second wife. John worked for Jane Austen’s wealthy brother Edward Austen Knight.

William Gibbs (c.1743 to 1812)

William Gibbs, the father of John Gibbs of Chawton, was born in about 1743, probably in Bentworth.

The village of Bentworth had originally consisted of two distinct manors known as Bentworth and Bentworth Hall but by the 1780s they were owned by two sisters, Mary and Eliza Heneage. In 1786 Eliza Heneage married Basil Fitzherbert and five years later Mary married his brother William Fitzherbert-Brockholes. The Fitzherberts were a Roman catholic family. Basil and William’s brother Thomas had died in 1781 and his widow, Maria, also a catholic, was the famous (or perhaps infamous) Mrs Fitzherbert who had secretly (and illegally) married Prince George, the King’s son, in 1785. Her relationship with the future King George IV officially ended in 1794 but in 1830, before he died, he asked to be buried with a miniature portrait of her.

On the 26th of December 1767 William Gibbs married Elizabeth Finden at the parish church of St. James in Wield and that was very probably her home village. They spent their married lives in Bentworth but their first child, a boy called John, was baptised in Wield in May 1768. Sadly he did not survive long. Two more children, Martha and George, were born in about 1772; they were probably twins. Martha was baptised in Bentworth and George in Wield but, like their older brother John, they died whilst still very young. William and Elizabeth had nine more children, all of whom were baptised in Bentworth.




William and Elizabeth Gibbs’ twelve children are shown in this chart.

Their first child, John, was born in 1768. The remaining children were born between 1772 and 1795.

Five of their children — the first of their two Johns, Elizabeth, both Georges, and William did not survive to reach adulthood.

William and Elizabeth’s last child, William, was baptised on the day before he died and was buried the following day. Elizabeth died only four weeks later, perhaps from complications arising from the birth. She must have been about 50 years old.

William survived his wife by 17 years to reach the age of 70. He was buried in Wield, presumably the village in which he had been born, in 1812.

Our story will continue with William and Elizabeth’s fourth child, John Gibbs of Chawton.

John Gibbs (1774 to 1847)

John was William and Elizabeth Gibbs’ fourth child and their second to be named John. He was baptised in Bentworth on the 19th of June 1774.

He was 21 years old when his mother Elizabeth died.

In December 1797, aged 23, John married Frances Emon in the parish church of St Nicholas in Chawton which is about four miles from Bentworth. John and Frances had no children and she died just four years later. She was buried in Chawton on the 14th of January 1802.

Six months later John married again. His bride was a 25 year old woman from Wield called Jane King and the wedding was on the 14th of July 1802 in the parish church of St. James in Wield. They lived together in Chawton which was their home for the rest of their lives.

A few years before John Gibbs moved to Chawton the owner of the estate, Thomas Knight, had died. His ancestors had owned the manor since 1551 and he wanted to keep it in the family name but he and his wife Catherine had no children. Thomas was a distant relative of George Austen, father of the author Jane Austen, and he had arranged for George to become vicar of Steventon in Hampshire. Thomas and Catherine took an interest in George Austen’s son Edward and made him their legal heir. Young Edward inherited Thomas Knight’s Chawton and Steventon estates in 1794 and, when Catherine Knight died in 1812, he also inherited Godmersham in Kent (although he had already been in control of Godmersham for several years). Edward changed his name to Knight, as required by Catherine’s will, and he was henceforth known as Edward Austen Knight.

The Chawton estate records show that John Gibbs worked for Edward Knight and rented his house from him.

Jane Austen, with her mother and sisters, lived in Chawton from 1809 to 1817 in a house which Edward Knight provided for them. During those years John Gibbs, his wife, and their young children, must have been familiar with the sight of the Austen ladies walking around the village. The house in which they lived is now a museum, as is Edward’s home, Chawton House, where the ladies were frequent visitors.




John Gibbs and his wife Jane had eight children. They were born between the years 1804 and 1819. Three of them emigrated to New Zealand.

It is not clear what became of their eldest child, William. There was, however, a William Gibbs born in the year 1804 who married and settled in Gosport, near Portsmouth Harbour, but he gave his place of birth as Bishop’s Sutton, not Chawton. Was he perhaps John and Jane’s son who had spent some of his youth in Bishop’s Sutton and regarded it, rather than Chawton as his home village? Probably not, but the coincidence in the names and dates is interesting. And if the two Williams were not the same person then why is there no record of John and Jane’s son William after his baptism on the 5th of February 1804?

A curious incident occurred in 1825. According to several local newspapers one William Oakley was committed to the County Gaol for stealing a hive of bees from John Gibbs’ garden.

John’s wife Jane died in August 1842 and was buried in Chawton. John died five years later in 1847 and was buried on Christmas Day.

John and Jane Gibbs’ children

•  William was baptised in 1804 after which there is no record of him.

•  James was baptised on the 13th of April 1806. In 1832 he married Anne Robinson and they had two children one of whom died very young. In Chawton James worked for John Morgan as a tree feller. In November 1841 James and Anne embarked for New Zealand with their young son William, and James’s brother Isaac and his wife. They sailed from Gravesend on the Bolton arriving in Nelson on the 15th of March 1842. There they settled near Nelson in Wakapuaka. They had another child, Martha, who was born in 1846 but in 1848 James’s wife Anne died. A year later James married Charlotte Very, a woman who had been born in Reading, England. They lived in Wakefield, also not far from Nelson, and James was one of the founders of the Plymouth Bretheren church there. James died in Wakefield in 1892 and Charlotte in 1899.

•  Martha was baptised in Chawton on the 18th of December 1808 after which no further record of her has been found.

•  Henry, John and Jane Gibbs’s fourth child, was baptised in Chawton on the 5th of May 1811. He died when he was only six years old.

•  Frances was baptised in Chawton on the 26th of September 1813 after which no further record of her has been found.

•  Mary Ann was baptised in Chawton on the 7th of July 1815. She married John Gillett, an agricultural labourer on Christmas Day in 1836. They had two children, Mary, Martha and Frances, and on the 27th of April 1842, they emigrated to New Zealand as two of her brothers had done a few months previously. Once there they lived in Nelson where John worked as a draper. He died there in 1895 and she died the following year and was buried in Motueka.

•  Isaac was born in Chawton on the 3rd of April 1818 and baptised a month later on the 3rd of May. When he was 21 years old he married Mary Ann Huse. He and Mary lived in Chawton with his parents and he worked as a labourer and wood cutter. They had a son called George who died in 1841 shortly before they emigrated to New Zealand travelling with his brother James and his family. He lived in Church Valley, Wakefield, and died there on June 30th 1903 aged 85 years. His wife Mary had died nine years before.

•  Jane was John and Jane’s youngest child. She was baptised in Chawton on the 23rd of July 1820. When she was 20 years old she married John White, an agricultural labourer. They lived in Chawton and had two children, James and Jane, who were born in 1842 and 1844 respectively. They spent their whole lives in Chawton. Jane died there in 1903 and John in 1920.



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You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.