Mary 16 Sicklemore

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Sicklemore (1605–1698), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Sussex, her parentage, her marriage to John Cox, her son John Scott Lynn Cox, and the broader context of early-17th-century England. Notable: exceptional longevity for the era and orphaned in infancy.

Mary Sicklemore, born in 1605 in the village of Lindfield, Sussex, England, and departing this life about 1698 in Surrey, stands among the earliest forebears traced in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. She was the daughter of James Sicklemore and Rose Mary Bellinger, both of whom are recorded as having died in the same year as her birth — a sorrowful circumstance not at all uncommon in the early seventeenth century, when childbed mortality and recurring outbreaks of plague and fever frequently left infants without one or both parents within their first year. The care of such orphaned children commonly fell to kindred or to the broader parish community under the customs of the day.

The Sussex of Mary's birth was a quiet, hedgerowed countryside of weald and downland, its agricultural rhythms only beginning to be touched by the religious upheavals that would soon stir the reign of James I and, in time, give rise to the great Puritan migrations across the Atlantic. Lindfield itself was an old market village whose timbered houses and parish church of St. John the Baptist would have provided the framework of community life into which Mary was born.

In time Mary was joined in marriage to John Cox, and from this union issued at least one recorded son, John Scott Lynn Cox, born in 1625 and living until 1700. Through this child the Sicklemore and Cox lines carried forward into succeeding generations of the family.

Mary's death about 1698 in Surrey suggests a life of remarkable length, spanning some ninety-three years — a longevity uncommon in any century but particularly striking in an age when the average span scarcely reached half that measure. Her years encompassed the reigns of seven English monarchs, the Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution.

Mary was the compiler's twelfth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.