Sir John White

Sir John White's life coincided exactly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. He was born in 1558 and died in 1625. Sir John was twenty-two when he succeeded his father, Thomas White, as High sheriff of Nottinghamshire.

Sir John White was married at the age of 32 to Dorothea Harpur, daughter of John Harpur of Swarkston. Sir John's father-in-law was "one of the most considerable gentlemen in Derbyshire." The Harpur pedigree can be traced for 14 generations before Dorothy, Lady White, beginning with Richard Harper, temp. Henry I. Dorothea White's grandmother, on her father's side, was Jane Finderne, heiress of Finderne. Of the house of Finderne, Burke writes- "The hamlet of Finderne, in the Parish of Mickleover, about four miles from Derby, was the chief residence of a family who derived their name from the place of their patrimony for nine generations,. From the times of Edward I to those of Henry VIII, when the male line became extinct and the estate passed, by the marriage of the heiress to the Harpurs, the house of Finderne was one of the most distinguished in Derbyshire. Members of it had won their spurs in the Crusades and also at the Cressy, and theAgincourt. Their territorial possessions were large as the Findernes were High Sheriffs, and were occasionally rangers of Needwood Forest, and also custodians of Tutbury Castle. Finderne originally erected temp. Edward I and restored and enlarged at one of the quaintest and largest mansions in the Midlands at different periods. The present Church had rows of monumental brasses and altar tombs, all memorials of the Findernes. Local legend says that the Findernes brought the so-called Finderne Flower back from the Holy Land by Sir Geoffrey Finderne.

At Greenwich, on 9 June 1619, King James I knighted Sir John White.

In 1615, Sir John's second son, Richard White, died at age nineteen and was buried at Tuxford. His third son, Gervase, also died young. His eldest, Thomas, succeeded his father. Sir John had one daughter, Anne, who married (at a date not known) John Welby of Moulton, in Lincolnshire, one of the same family of Welby into which the previous generation had married. She died sometime prior to 1634 and left only one daughter, Mary, who died young.

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