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- Born in Oswestry, Shropshire, he migrated to London, where he prospered and became master of the Merchant Taylors' Company.
His will and the will of his son John both state that he was born in Oswestry, and both wills bequeath money for the relief of Oswestry's poor.1
His own will, dated 18 Oct 1608, was a nuncupative one, taken by Peirce Williams, whose given name is spelled, in the document, both Peirce and Pearse. In it, the elder John Swinnerton calls Williams "kinsman" to his son John.
His parentage is not established, but he is widely speculated to have been a son of Richard Swinnerton of Oswestry, who may have been a younger son or grandson of Humphrey de Swynnerton of Swynnerton in Staffordshire (d. 1464) and his wife Anna (d. 1470), who was also a Swynnerton, heiress of the Hilton, Staffordshire branch of the family. In the 1633 visitation of London, his grandson Robert (1602-1652), son of John, gives a pedigree consisting only of his parent's names and that of his paternal grandfather — but the arms he gives show Swynnerton of Swynnerton quartering Swynnerton of Hilton.2
Notably for the ancestry of DDB, this database's modern descendant of all these people, the aforementioned Humphrey de Swynnerton, possible grandfather or great-grandfather of this John Swinnerton, was himself a great-grandson of Robert de Swynnerton (d. 1387) and his wife Elizabeth Beke, who are proven 18G-grandparents of DDB through one of his four "gateway ancestors," Thomas Bressey (1601-1649). And Humphrey's wife Anna de Swynnerton, of the Hilton Swynnertons, was a 6G-granddaughter of John de Swynnerton and his wife Eleanor de Peshale (d. 1254), who are proven 22G-grandparents of DDB, also through Thomas Bressey.
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(1) Both wills are transcribed in "The Swinnertons of Oswestry," author uncredited, in Swinnerton Family History volume 6, number 4, September 1985.
(2) It must be noted that this Robert Swinnerton, clothworker and merchant of London, appears to have had family issues; he is described in 1650 as having "contumaciously" refused to administer his mother's will.
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