Margery Nedham

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margery Nedham (1520–abt 1599), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Gloucestershire, her marriage to Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle, her son Humphery Whittington, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: she stands among the earliest documented English forebears in the Hyten lineage.

Margery Nedham, born in the year 1520 in the city of Gloucester, in the county of Gloucestershire, England, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the paternal-grandfather branch of the Hyten family. Her birth fell within the early reign of King Henry VIII, in a Tudor England then beginning its long and turbulent transformation — religious, political, and social — that would reshape the realm across the sixteenth century. Gloucestershire in this period was a prosperous county of cloth-making and river trade, its life centered upon the cathedral city and the broad valley of the Severn.

Margery was joined in marriage to Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle, a union that carried with it the dignity of knightly rank. Marriages of the gentry in that age were occasions of careful consequence, binding families through estate, name, and obligation, and the title borne by her husband indicates a household of standing within the Tudor social order.

Of this marriage there is recorded a son, Humphery Whittington, who carried forward the family name and who himself lived into the reign of King James I, departing this life in the year 1625. Through Humphery the line descended in time across generations and across the Atlantic, in due course reaching the American branches whose history this archive preserves.

Margery is said to have died about the year 1599, in the county of Yorkshire, England, having attained an age near fourscore — a remarkable span for that century, which had seen her live through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and the long Elizabethan age then drawing to its close. Her removal from Gloucestershire to Yorkshire in the latter portion of her life is suggested by the place of her death, though the particulars of that passage are not preserved.

Margery Nedham was a thirteen-times-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather line.