Author: Dennis, Thomas
Biography:
DENNIS, Thomas (1764-1815: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 23 Aug. 1764 at Bramshot, Hampshire, the second son and third of four children of the rector, Rev. Jonathan Dennis (1711-91) (MA Queen’s College Oxford 1737) and his wife Sarah Whitehead (1735-80), who had married in 1759. It is not known where he went to school but he proceeded to Magdalen Hall, Oxford (matric. 1783). There is no record of him taking a degree. His elder brother, Whitehead, (Queen’s, MA 1778) entered the church and Thomas followed him. He was briefly curate at Headley, Hampshire, before moving to Haslemere. He married Elizabeth Dare (1774-1851), 16 June 1794, at nearby Hascombe, Surrey. They went on to have ten children. He was recorded as curate of Haslemere on the title page of A New Version of the Psalms (1808) but soon after moved to King’s Langley, Herts. and at the time of his death on 21 Feb. 1815 was curate of Overton and Laverstock, Hampshire. His wife, pregnant with their tenth child, reached him in his dying moments, finding only a pound and a little silver in his pocket which she declared to be the sum of their wealth. A subscription was raised for her and the children and an attempt was probably made to place the sons at the Clergy Orphan School or Christ’s Hospital which often took orphans of clergy. However, she survived a further thirty-five years and the subscription would almost certainly have been insufficient long-term. Elizabeth Dennis died in 1851, aged 78, at Bishop Morley’s College, Winchester, a long-established almshouse for the widows of clergy. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Sept. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 29 Sept. 2022; Hampshire Chronicle 27 Feb. 1815, 15 Nov. 185; GM Mar. 1815, 280; Salisbury and Winchester Journal 6 Mar. 1815) AA