John Joseph Clarke

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Joseph Clarke (1536–1610), a 14× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Westhorpe, Suffolk, his parentage, marriage to Lady Rose Alis Fenne, his daughter Elizabeth Alice Clarke, his death in Blundeston with Flixton, and Tudor–Jacobean English era context.

John Joseph Clarke (1536–1610) was born in the year 1536 at Westhorpe, in the county of Suffolk, England, and departed this life on the 23rd day of March, 1610, at Blundeston with Flixton, also in Suffolk. His life thus spanned three-quarters of a century and four English sovereigns — born in the latter years of King Henry VIII, he passed through the brief reign of Edward VI, the Marian restoration, the long Elizabethan age, and into the early Jacobean era under King James I. Suffolk in this period was a prosperous agricultural and weaving county, deeply marked by the religious turbulence of the English Reformation, and its gentry families occupied a settled place within the fabric of parish and shire.

He was the son of Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton and Lady Agnes Anne Massey, also styled Mayce or Macey, of Colyton, his father bearing the dignity of knighthood and the family carrying the territorial designation of Colyton in its style. In due course John Joseph Clarke was united in marriage to Lady Rose Alis Fenne, and from this union there issued at least one recorded child, a daughter, Elizabeth Alice Clarke, who survived her father by some two decades before her own death in the year 1630.

Through this daughter the Clarke line passed forward across the generations, weaving in time into the broader tapestry of families whose descendants would, centuries later, cross the Atlantic and take root in the soil of America. Suffolk itself, with its market towns, parish churches, and East Anglian traditions, formed the cradle of many such lineages that would feed into the great Puritan and post-Puritan migrations of the seventeenth century.

John Joseph Clarke stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a fourteen-times great-grandfather.