Gilbert Hix II

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Gilbert Hix II (1545–1599), a 13× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Wiltshire, parentage, marriage to Marion Warde, his son Gilbert, death in Devonshire, and Elizabethan-era English context. Notable: among the earliest documented English forebears of the Hyten/Hicks line, situated in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Gilbert Hix II, born on the nineteenth of November 1545 in the parish of Stapleford, County Wiltshire, England, and departed this life on the twenty-fifth of March 1599 in Thornbury, County Devonshire, stands among the earliest documented forebears of the Hyten family on the paternal-grandfather line. He was the son of Gilbert Hicks and Dianne Atwood, a placement that ties the family firmly to the south-western English shires during the Tudor age.

His life unfolded across the long reign of Elizabeth I, an era in which rural Wiltshire and Devonshire were largely populated by yeoman farmers, husbandmen, and tradesmen bound closely to parish life. The chalk downlands of Wiltshire and the wooded vales of Devon were regions of established Anglican parishes following the Reformation settlement, and the keeping of christening, marriage, and burial registers in such parishes — instituted in 1538 — is precisely what permits the preservation of dates such as those recorded here. His removal in the course of life from Wiltshire to Devonshire would not have been uncommon, as the western counties of England were knit together by trade in wool, cloth, and agricultural produce.

Gilbert was joined in marriage to Marion Warde, and of this union came at least one son who carried forward the family name: Gilbert E. Hicks (also rendered Hix), whose own life would close in the year 1640, on the eve of the great upheavals of the English Civil War. Through this son the line descended toward those later generations who would eventually cross the Atlantic and plant the family name in the soil of the American colonies.

Though no further particulars of Gilbert Hix II's daily station, occupation, or character survive in the present record, the bare framework of his dates and kindred preserves a vital link in the chain of descent. Gilbert Hix II was the compiler's thirteen-times great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal-grandfather line.