Anne Edith Toogood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anne Edith Toogood (1728–1784), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Leigh, Dorset, her parentage, her marriage to John White, the birth of her son William Grottley White, her death at Warmwell, and the rural Dorset context of the Georgian era.

Anne Edith Toogood was born in the year 1728 in the parish of Leigh, in the county of Dorset, England, the daughter of William Toogood (1701–1760) and his wife Elizabeth Burton (1701–1776). Her people were of the Dorset countryside, that quiet pastoral region of southern England distinguished in the eighteenth century by its chalk downs, sheep husbandry, and tightly knit village parishes whose registers preserved generations of yeoman families.

Anne came of age in a Britain still under the Hanoverian kings, an era in which the agricultural rhythms of rural Dorset framed nearly every aspect of village life. Marriages, baptisms, and burials were entered into parish books by the rector's hand, and family identity was bound closely to the soil of the immediate neighborhood.

In the course of her life Anne was united in marriage with John White, and from this union there came her son William Grottley White, born in 1760, who would carry the line forward into the next century and live until 1841. Whether other children were born to the couple is not preserved among the records consulted by the compiler; only William's name has descended through the family memory.

Anne Edith Toogood departed this life on the 27th day of October, 1784, at Warmwell, Dorset — a small parish lying east of Dorchester, not many miles from the place of her birth. She was fifty-six years of age. Her parents had each preceded her in death, her father by some four-and-twenty years and her mother by eight, and she was laid to rest in the same Dorset earth from which her family had been drawn for generations.

Anne Edith Toogood was a seventh great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, and stands as one of the English forebears whose name has been faithfully retained in the family register.