Author: Seward, William
Biography:
SEWARD, William (b c. 1756: ancestry.com)
William Seward, author of A Tour to Yordes Cave (1801), displays his local knowledge not only in the subject of his poem—which was something of a natural wonder and had been written about before by the Rev. John Hutton—but also in the sample of local dialect that he provides to supplement the work. He was a potter: no reliable birth record has been found but the record of his first marriage, in 1779, gives that as his occupation, with Burton in Lonsdale, Yorkshire, as his place of residence. He married Ann Armistead on 5 Apr. 1779 at her parish of Bentham, Yorkshire. After she died in 1799 he married Ann Dodgson, again at Bentham, on 29 Dec. 1801. There may have been one daughter, Betty, born in 1799, from the first marriage; there were at least three from the second. The youngest child was born in 1808. No likely death record has been found for Seward, although one of the family histories on Ancestry assigns a death date of 1833 at Burton. (ancestry.com 2 Jan. 2024; findmypast.com 2 Jan. 2024; Alexander John Ellis, On Early English Pronunciation [1889], 608) HJ