George Haselock

From the Hyten family archive; subject is George Haselock (1600–1663), an eleven-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth in Yorkshire, transatlantic settlement in colonial Virginia, marriage to Michell Bramman, his son and heir, and the broader era context of early seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonization.

George Haselock (1600–1663) entered the world in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, at the dawn of the seventeenth century — an England still under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I in his earliest infancy, and soon to pass under the Stuart crown of James I. The North Riding in that era was a land of dales, market towns, and parish churches, its people shaped by the rhythms of agriculture and the long shadow of the English Reformation. Into such a setting George was born, bearing a surname that would, in the manner of the age, drift through several spellings before settling into family memory.

At some point in the decades that followed, George crossed the Atlantic to the English colony of Virginia, joining the steady current of Yorkshire and other northern Englishmen who sought new fortunes in the Chesapeake. He took to wife Michell Bramman, and of their union came a son, George Frances Haslock, born about 1620, who would carry the line forward.

George made his home in Rappahannock, in the tidewater country of colonial Virginia — a region in those years thick with tobacco plantations, river landings, and the small wooden churches of the established Anglican faith. The Rappahannock settlements lay along the great river of that name, and life there was bounded by the labor of the field, the perils of disease, and the slow building of a colonial society still less than two generations removed from the founding of Jamestown.

George Haselock departed this life on the ninth day of July, 1663, in Rappahannock, having lived some sixty-three years and seen the passage from Elizabethan England to Restoration-era Virginia. His son survived him only briefly, both father and son passing in the same year.

George was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.