190 The F other gill Family as Ornithologists. 
biography of William Fothergill (G) as given by Mr. Bernard 
Thistlethwaite : — 1 
‘ William Fothergill was born on 24th October, 1748, at 
Carr End, Wensleydale, Yorkshire. William Fothergill, 
yeoman, of Carr End, was married 14th August, 1782, at 
Counterside Meeting House, to Hannah Robinson, daughter 
of Amos and Jane Robinson, of Semerdale, the small valley 
in which Counterside and Carr End lie. William Fothergill, 
although the second surviving son, succeeded, at tjie death of 
his father, Alexander Fothergill, on 21st January, 1788, to 
the family farm and house at Carr End, where he died in Feb- 
ruary, 1837, aged eighty-eight years. His wife, Hannah 
Fothergill, died at Carr End, 22nd June, 1836, and was buried 
at Bainbridge. By her he had a family of three sons and two 
daughters,* * * § the eldest of whom was John, and whose bio- 
graphy will be given later.’ 
William Fothergill (G) was, if nothing more, an observer 
of nature, and the records of the occurrence of the Little 
Crakef in 1807, and the Swallow -tailed Kite in 1805, in 
Wensleydale,^ are due to him.§ Both these records were 
subsequently quoted by Yarrell in the three editions of his 
History of British Birds, and when the fourth edition of this 
work (Vols. I. and II. edited by Alfred Newton, and Vols. 
III. and IV. by Howard Saunders) was in progress, Newton 
was at some pains to verify the story of the Swallow-tailed 
Kite. || Having recently (28th April, 1921) interviewed 
Mr. W. S. Fothergill, I am in a position to state that the 
‘ original note ’ supplied to Newton by ‘ Mr. William Fother- 
gill of Darlington ’ (Mr. W. S. Fothergill’s father) was in 
the handwriting of Mr. William Fothergill’s grandfather, not 
‘ father ’ as stated by Newton, who is a generation short. 
This error in genealogy has been copied by Mr. T. H. Nelson 
in his Birds of Yorkshire.^ [ As has already been stated, he 
carried on an ornithological correspondence with his nephew, 
Charles Fothergill (H), and from what I have been told by 
his descendants, I can well believe that William Fothergill (G) 
was the moving spirit, not only of his nephew but also of his 
son John Fothergill (I), as regards the study of nature. 
* The Thistlethwaite Family : A Study in Genealogy (1910), p. 161. 
f W. Eagle Clarke, in Handbook of the Vertebrate Fauna of Yorkshire 
(1881) suggests (p. 64) that this may have been a Baillon’s Crake, but 
T. H. Nelson, in The Birds of Yorkshire (1907) retains it (Vol. II., p. 538) 
as a Little Crake. 
+ Trans, of the Linn ae an Society : Vol. XIV. (1825), pp. 583-584. 
§ See also op. cit. Vol. XIII. (1822), ‘ Some Observations on the 
(Economy of the Toad,’ by William Fothergill, pp. 618-620. 
[| A History of British Birds, by William Yarrell (4th ed.), Vol. I., 
1871-4, ed. by Alfred Newton, pp. 104-5 and 107-8. 
T. H. Nelson : The Birds of Yorkshire (1907), Vol. I., p. 348. 
Naturalist 
