William Wilson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Wilson (1568–1625), a 13× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Lincolnshire birth and death, parentage, marriage to Prudence Leigh, his son Col. John Theophilus Wilson, and Elizabethan/Jacobean English context. Notable: English progenitor whose descendants would carry the Wilson name into colonial America.

William Wilson, born the eleventh day of July in the year 1568 at Navenby in the county of Lincolnshire, England, stood among the earliest documented forebears of the Wilson branch entering the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. He was the son of William George Wilson and Lady Alice Clarke, and his life unfolded entirely within the rolling agricultural country of Lincolnshire, a region long marked by parish churches of ancient foundation, market towns, and the steady rhythms of English yeoman and gentry life.

William came of age during the latter reign of Elizabeth I, a period in which England consolidated its Protestant settlement under the Church of England, contended with the threat of the Spanish Armada, and saw the flowering of English letters and exploration. He lived on into the reign of James I, an era in which Lincolnshire families of standing — distinguished by such honorifics as that borne by his mother — participated in the slow transformation of English rural society, even as religious dissent began to drive other countrymen toward the New World.

He was joined in marriage to Prudence Leigh, born about the year 1565. Of their union is recorded a son, Col. John Theophilus Wilson, born in 1605 and living until 1687, whose military title and long life suggest a descendant who came to prominence in the troubled decades of the English Civil War and Restoration, or in colonial service abroad. Through this son the Wilson line was carried forward into succeeding generations that would eventually contribute to the compiler's American ancestry.

William Wilson died on the first day of February in the year 1625 at Donington upon Bain in Lincolnshire, a small parish in the Lincolnshire Wolds, having lived some fifty-six years. His passing occurred in the very month and year that King James I himself would die, marking the close of an age.

William was the compiler's 13× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.