Mary Tate

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Tate (1688–1729), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth, parentage, transatlantic passage, marriage to William 'Thomas' Branson, her daughter Elizabeth, and the Quaker-era Pennsylvania context of her life. Notable: early colonial Chester County settler born in Berkshire, England.

Mary Tate (1688–1729) was born in the parish of Sunning, in Berkshire, England, the daughter of Robert Tate (1638–1689) and Elizabeth Henderson (1644–1690). She came into the world during the turbulent final year of the reign of James II, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution that would reshape England's political and religious landscape. Berkshire in the late seventeenth century was a region of market towns and chalk downs along the Thames, and Sunning itself was a riverside parish of long-standing antiquity.

By the early years of her life, Mary had lost both of her parents, her father passing in 1689 and her mother in 1690, leaving her orphaned in infancy. The circumstances of her upbringing and the means by which she crossed the Atlantic are not preserved in the family record, but in time she settled in the colony of Pennsylvania, the proprietary refuge founded by William Penn for the Society of Friends. The Delaware Valley in the early eighteenth century drew a steady current of English emigrants, many of them Quakers and dissenters, who established farms and meetinghouses along the tributaries of the Schuylkill and the Brandywine.

In Pennsylvania she was joined in marriage to William "Thomas" Branson. To this union was born a daughter, Elizabeth Branson (1715–1788), through whom the family line continued forward into the generations of the American colonial period and beyond.

Mary died in 1729 in Chester, Pennsylvania, at the age of approximately forty-one. Chester, the oldest city in Pennsylvania and the first landing place of William Penn upon the Delaware, was in her time a small but established colonial seat, anchoring the Quaker settlements of the surrounding county. Her early death left her daughter Elizabeth still a young woman of fourteen.

Mary Tate was an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.