Tony Hadland has written to us and advised us of the following:
With the Yates, as with so many families, we suffer from the problem of the same forenames being used not only in successive generations but also by cousins, etc. There were a number of Yate families in the Vale, so it is sometimes tricky to determine, for example, which Francis is which. And there are John Yates and Mary Yates galore, often contemporaries living in close proximity.
That said, the female form Frances is much rarer among the Yates. Thomas Yate (died 1565) married Frances White and they had a son called Francis (thought to be born in the early 1530s and who died in 1588). Francis was the owner of Lyford and married Jane Tichborne (probably about 1560): their son, another Thomas Yate and also an owner of Lyford Grange, was born about 1570 and still alive in 1623. The first wife of this second Thomas was Mary Tregian, whose father was imprisoned for 28 years for harbouring the canonised Catholic martyr Cuthbert Mayne. One of their daughters was Frances Clare Yate (1597?-1625), a Franciscan nun at Nieuport in Flanders.
If the widowed Frances Yate was still alive at the time, she was possibly the tenant of Charney Manor who sublet it. However, the spelling of Frances/Francis can occasionally be inconsistent for records of this period (at least when transcribed) and in the context of Yates I have come across the spelling ‘Frances’ being used for a male and ‘Francis’ for a female. So, ‘Frances’ and ‘Francis’ may indeed have been the same person.
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