Numerous sources on the internet ERRONEOUSLY state that the father of John Seymour of Sawbridgeworth was Duke Edward Seymour. This is wrong. For a long time I was fooled into thinking that so many repetitions of the same information must mean there was a solid connection. As a result I spent many, many hours researching Sir John Seymour and his family thinking that it would lead from him, through John Seymour of Sawbridgeworth and on down to me. But all those hours of work merely showed me that so many people had just carelessly repeated the same error over and over. Information in ancient printed sources show it to be an error.
I did finally find one internet source to dispute that claim which showed documented evidence:
father of John Seymour, of Sawbridgeworth
"The parents of John Seymour of Sawbridgeworth, died 1605, tradesman, were not the Duke and Duchess of Somerset. According to The Complete Peerage by George Edward Cokayne, John Seymour son of Edward Seymour and Katherine Fillot died unmarried."
While both Henry and Edward had sons named John, they are not the John from Sawbridgeworth. There was a second Seymour family, and this John probably comes from that family, although that family does not have extensive records as the Duke Edward Seymour family does.
In "Annals of the Seymours," St. Maur shows a pedigree chart of the Seymour family which shows that Duke Edward's son, John, died unmarried in 1552. (facing page 1), and repeats the claim in the text on page 20: "John Seymour, knight, ... died July 15, 1520, unmarried," and in a footnote credits the Dictionary of National Biography. The same chart shows that Duke Edward's father, Sir John Seymour, had two sons both named John. The first died unmarried in 1520, and the second died young. So there were many John Seymours, and that is likely part of the confusion that led to thes errors.
On page 6, St. Maur describes the two Seymour families:
"In the Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, vol. xv, p. 142, we see Mr. J. R. Planche (Brit. Archaeol. Journ., 1856, p. 325) says: " There are two families of St. Maur. The St. Maurs or Seymours of Kingston Seymour, in Somersetshire, who trace their pedigree to Milo de Sancto Mauro, who with his wife Agnes, is named in a fine roll of King John; and the St. Maurs or Seymours of Penhow, Monmouthshire, from which the present ducal house of Somerset descends. All our genealogists, from Dugdale downwards, are scrupulous in observing that there is no connection whatever between the two families, who bore different arms and settled in different counties, and I freely admit there is no connection to be traced between them from the earliest date to which they have proved their pedigree; but that fact by no means satisfies me that they did not branch from the same Norman stock."
A second error, not repeated as much as the first, states that John Seymour of Sawbridgeworth was the son of Duke Edward's brother Henry. This is also not true. On page 21, St. Maur states: "Sir Henry Seymour, knight, who married Barbara, daughter of Morgan Wolfe, Esq., by whom he had three sons, of whom there is no issue remaining." So, even if one of those three sons was named John, it was not John of Sawbridgeworth as "there is no issue remaining;" i.e., they had no children who lived.
