Michell Bramman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Michell Bramman (1600–1632), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth, brief life, Yorkshire death, marriage to George Haselock, her son George Frances Haslock, and her mother Alice Marchell Lowesley. Notable: early 17th-century English forebear; her short life spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I.

Michell Bramman, born in 1600 in England and laid to rest on the sixth of July, 1632, in Yorkshire, stands among the earliest English forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. Her brief span of two-and-thirty years encompassed an England in profound transition: the closing years of Elizabeth I, the reign of James I with its attendant religious and political tensions, and the early, troubled years of Charles I, whose conflicts with Parliament would soon precipitate civil war. Yorkshire in this period remained a region of broad agricultural estates, market towns, and parish life centered upon the established Church, though dissenting currents stirred beneath the surface throughout the north of England.

Michell was a daughter of Alice Marchell Lowesley, who survived her by some seven years, dying in 1639. The presence of the mother's name in the family register, while the father's is absent from these particular records, preserves at least one thread of Michell's maternal ancestry across the centuries.

In the manner of her age, Michell married and bore children before her early death. Her husband was George Haselock, and from their union came at least one recorded child, George Frances Haslock, born in 1620 and living until 1663. The variant spelling of the surname between father and son — Haselock and Haslock — was wholly characteristic of the period, when orthography of family names remained fluid and often shifted from one parish record to the next.

Michell did not live to see her son reach full maturity, dying when he was about twelve years of age. Yet through this son the family line continued, eventually crossing the Atlantic and joining the broader lineage that would, generations later, find itself in the American Midwest.

Michell Bramman was an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.