Daniel G 16 Goodwin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel G Goodwin (1600–1625), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Yoxford, Suffolk, his parentage, his marriage to Dorothy Chapman Barker, and his sole recorded child. Notable: short Jacobean-era English life predating the family's eventual transatlantic migration.

Daniel G Goodwin (1600–1625) was born in the village of Yoxford, in the Suffolk Coastal District of Suffolk, England, and died in the same parish on the fifteenth of February, 1625, at the age of approximately twenty-five years. His was a brief life, bracketed entirely by the borders of his native Suffolk village, yet his single recorded child would carry the Goodwin name forward across generations and, eventually, an ocean.

He was the son of John S Goodwin and Elizabeth Woodgate, both of whom died in the year of Daniel's birth, 1600. The coincidence of dates suggests that Daniel entered the world under the shadow of profound loss, a circumstance not uncommon in early seventeenth-century England, where epidemic disease and the perils of childbirth routinely orphaned the newborn. Yoxford in this era was a modest agricultural parish in eastern Suffolk, lying within the wool-and-grain economy of the Suffolk coast and forming part of the broader social fabric of Jacobean rural England. The reign of James I, then in its early decades, was a period of religious tension and growing Puritan dissent — currents that would, within a generation, set many Suffolk families upon the road toward the New World.

Daniel married Dorothy Chapman Barker, and from their union was born one recorded child, Daniel Goodwin (1620–1712), who survived his father by nearly nine decades and would live a life vastly longer than the one his father was granted. The younger Daniel's longevity, set against the elder's brevity, marks a striking contrast in the early generations of this Goodwin line.

The elder Daniel's death in February of 1625 came in the final weeks of the reign of James I, who himself died the following month. He left behind a young widow and a five-year-old son to carry the family forward.

Daniel G Goodwin was the compiler's 11× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.