Bridget Hodgson's Children
It is not entirely clear how many children Phineas and Bridget had. The will of Thomas Hodgson (Phineas's father) mentions three boys (Phineas, Henry, and Thomas) and a girl (Elizabeth). After this, Phineas and Bridget appear to have had two more children, for Bridget's burial marker mentions four sons and two daughters. We do not know the name of the youngest son, but the younger daughter is named Bridget, presumably after her mother.
Notwithstanding this fecundity, by 1683, the ranks of the Hodgson children had thinned considerably; while both of the girls appear in her will, the boys are nowhere to be found.
To Bridget's dismay, Elizabeth seems to have suffered from defficiencies similar to her father. Bridget had such scorn for this child that she did not even mention her by name:
I give unto my son in law Edward Stamford ten pounds, and to my daughter his wife and her children every of them a piece of gold called a guinea, which I declare shall be in full satisfaction of all they can or ought to claim out of my estate in regard they have been chargeable unto me in an extraordinary measure.
In contrast, young Bridget received large sums of money, her mother's jewelery, and all her household goods; while we cannot put a precise value on these bequests, they were worth worth hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.
Bridget's sons present an even more confusing picture, for they (along with Brdiget and Phineas) make a remarkable appearance in an account left by one Thomas Baskerville, a seventeenth century topographer. Baskerville's papers focus entirely on Bridget and the bloody end met by the men in her life.
For more on the deaths of the Hodgson men, Read on.