Elizabeth Alice Clarke

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Alice Clarke (1571–1630), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Suffolk, parentage in the Clarke and Fenne families, her daughter Elizabeth Townes, and her death at Great Yarmouth. Era context: late Elizabethan and early Stuart England, on the eve of Puritan migration to New England.

Elizabeth Alice Clarke was born on the nineteenth of August, 1571, in the parish of Blundeston, in the Waveney district of Suffolk, England, and departed this life on the seventh of September, 1630, at Great Yarmouth, in the neighboring county of Norfolk. Her years spanned a remarkable interval of English history, opening in the middle decades of Elizabeth I's reign and closing in the early years of Charles I, when the religious and political pressures that would soon drive thousands of East Anglians across the Atlantic to New England were already gathering force.

She was the daughter of John Joseph Clarke, who died in 1610, and Lady Rose Alis Fenne, who survived her husband by nearly a decade and died in 1619. The family was thus settled in the Suffolk and Norfolk countryside of the late Tudor and early Stuart period, a region of market towns, herring fisheries, and weaving villages whose Protestant convictions were well established by the time of Elizabeth's youth. Great Yarmouth, where she ended her days, was in this era one of the busiest ports on the North Sea coast and a town of pronounced Puritan sympathies.

Of Elizabeth's own household the archive preserves the record of a daughter, Elizabeth Townes, who survived her mother by nine years and died in 1639. Through this daughter the Clarke line passes forward into the generations that would, in time, give rise to branches of the family resident in the American colonies.

Elizabeth Alice Clarke died at the age of fifty-nine. She was a thirteenth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and stands among the earliest forebears in that line for whom both birth and death are recorded with such precision in the family archive.