*Col. John Theophilus WILSON **1605

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Col. John Theophilus Wilson (1605–1687), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, parentage, transatlantic settlement in colonial Virginia, marriage, and sole recorded issue. Notable: an early 17th-century English emigrant to the Virginia Colony bearing a colonial military title, with an unverified Ancestry hint flagged in the surname.

Col. John Theophilus Wilson was born on the 24th of August, 1605, in the parish of Willoughby in Lincolnshire, England, the son of William Wilson, who died in 1625, and of Prudence Leigh, born about 1565 and deceased in 1607. He himself lived until the 2nd of July, 1687, when he died in Bristol Parish, Henrico County, in the Colony of Virginia, having reached the considerable age of eighty-one years. It should be noted that the surname attribution carries an unverified Ancestry hint, and the connection between this Lincolnshire-born John and the Virginia colonel of the same name, while plausible, has not been independently confirmed in the family records; readers are urged to weigh the line accordingly.

His early years were passed amid the religious and political tumult of Jacobean England, a period in which Lincolnshire and its neighboring shires sent forth no small number of emigrants to the new English plantations across the Atlantic. By the latter portion of his life, he had been transplanted to the Virginia Colony, settling in Bristol Parish of Henrico County — a region then situated along the upper reaches of the James River, lying on the very frontier of English colonial expansion in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The military title of Colonel, by which he was known, was characteristic of the colonial militia organization of that age, in which planters of standing assumed responsibilities for the defense of their parish and county.

He was united in marriage with Mercy Wilson, and of this union there is recorded one child: Angelina Wilson, born in 1630 and surviving until 1710, through whom the line descends to the compiler.

Col. John Theophilus Wilson stood as the compiler's twelfth great-grandfather upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, representing one of the earliest English forebears traceable in that branch of the Hyten family pedigree.