Mary Ann Whittington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Ann Whittington (1595–1650), an eleven-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Cheshire, parentage, marriage to John Smallwood, her son James Matthew Smallwood, and the broader context of early-seventeenth-century England. Notable: she lived through the English Civil War era and represents one of the archive's earliest documented English forebears.

Mary Ann Whittington (1595–1650) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, an eleven-times great-grandmother whose life unfolded entirely within the cloth of seventeenth-century England. She was born on the 23rd of November, 1595, in the ancient salt town of Middlewich, in Cheshire, the daughter of Humphery Whittington, who survived into his daughter's adulthood before his death in 1625. The Cheshire of her birth was a county of timbered market towns, salt-works, and parish life still ordered by the rhythms of the Church of England, only a generation removed from the Elizabethan settlement.

Mary Ann came of age during a turbulent passage in English history. The reign of James I gave way to that of Charles I, and the religious and political quarrels that would erupt into civil war in 1642 shaped the world in which she lived as wife and mother. Cheshire itself would become contested ground during those wars, with families and parishes divided between Royalist and Parliamentarian sympathies. Whatever her own household's leanings, Mary Ann's later years were lived under the shadow of armed conflict, regicide, and the unsettled early years of the Commonwealth.

She married John Smallwood, and from their union descended at least one son recorded in the family register, James Matthew Smallwood, born in 1639 and living until 1714. Through this son the Smallwood and Whittington lines were carried forward, eventually crossing the Atlantic in later generations to take root in the soil that would produce the compiler's American ancestors.

Mary Ann died in 1650, in England, at roughly fifty-four years of age, having witnessed the execution of a king the year before and the opening chapter of a republican experiment that would not long outlive her. She was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.