Purvis Hardwicke’s County Families Form

Description

Summary: Printed proof-form circulated by Robert Hardwicke, publisher, of 192 Piccadilly, London, soliciting biographical particulars for inclusion in Hardwicke's County Families: or Royal Manual of the Titled and Untitled Aristocracy of the Three Kingdoms, edited by Edward Walford, M.A., late Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford. The form is a single sheet, printed recto with a manuscript return on the verso/in the fields, and bears the printed request that it be returned with the subscription form on page 3 by early post.
The entry has been completed in ink by hand with biographical details concerning the Rev. Richard Fortescue Purves (the surname rendered inconsistently as both Purves and Purvis), Vicar of Whitsbury in the counties of Hants and Wilts. The particulars recorded include:

Parentage: only surviving son of the late John Child Purvis, Admiral of the Blue, and brother of the late John Brett Purvis, Vice-Admiral of the Red; mother Catharine Sowers, daughter of John Sowers, Clerk of the Cheque at Deptford.
Born 1809 (queried); married 1824 (queried) to Elizabeth Helen Baker, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Baker, Rector of Rollesby, Norfolk.
Education: Royal Naval College, Portsmouth; Jesus College, Cambridge (First Class, Law Tripos 1821/2; LL.B. 1825).
Appointments: presented by his father to the Vicarage of Whitsbury in 1824; Magistrate for Hants and Wilts; Domestic Chaplain to the Earl of Limerick.
Military service: retired Captain, H.M. Indian Army, bearing medal and clasp for action in Nepaul under Sir David Ochterlony, 1816–17.
Family origin: descended from the Purveses of that Ilk in Berwickshire, Baronets of Nova Scotia.
Country address: Whitsbury, near Fordingbridge; Breamore, Hants.
Heir: his son Fortescue Richard Purvis, born 1828, bachelor.

The form is one of many such returns gathered by Walford and Hardwicke for the annually issued County Families directory (first edition 1860); an associated letter dated 1870 dates this return to that year, most likely prepared for the 1870 or 1871 edition. The document is of interest both as an example of mid-Victorian genealogical publishing practice and as a primary-source autobiographical statement by the subject (or a family informant) concerning the Purvis/Purves naval and clerical family.