Papers of the Whitaker family

The papers are twofold: family financial arrangements such as mortgages and marriage settlements and the naval certificates and commissions of Thomas Whitaker 1803-1815. The marriage settlements are those of Thomas Whitaker and Frances Pearson (1779), Thomas Whitaker and Mary Dawson (1783) and Robert Whitaker and Sophia Lowe Thornton Duesbery (1856). The papers probably became part of the Crust Todd and Mills archive through this marriage to a member of the Duesbery family, lawyers of Beverley.

Thomas Whitaker lived in Worksop. Soon after his marriage to Frances Pearson of Derbyshire was settled in 1779 he arranged a mortgage through George Whitaker (probably his father or brother) on a house near the Market Cross in Worksop. He remarried in 1783 suggesting that his first wife died young. His second wife, Mary Dawson, brought money into the marriage and in 1785 they bought an estate in Arnold. Thomas Whitaker's son, also Thomas, was a midshipman on HMS 'Melpomene' and HMS 'Mars' 1803-9. He rose to the rank of lieutenant on HMS 'Kent' in 1809 and served in that capacity on this ship until 1813 when he joined HMS 'Queen'. At the end of the Napoleonic War period he became master of the sloop 'Merlin'. He was father to Robert Whitaker (b.circa 1831) some of whose papers are also in the collection. Robert Whitaker was admitted as a pensioner to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1850 and took BA 1854 and MA 1857. He went into the church, spending the last 21 years of his life as rector of Scorborough and Leconfield before dying in 1880. He married Sophia Lowe Thornton Duesbery and their son Arthur Lionel Whitaker (b.1876) followed his father into the church and was still a practising curate in the 1950s (Alumni Cantabrigiensis).

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