Marion Warde

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Marion Warde (1547–1597/98), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Suffolk, her parentage in the English gentry, her marriage to Gilbert Hix II, her son Gilbert Hicks, her death in Devonshire, and the Elizabethan era context surrounding her life.

Marion Warde, born the 22nd of December, 1547, at Homersfield in the county of Suffolk, England, and departing this life on the 13th of April, 1597/98, at Thornbury in the county of Devonshire, stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. She was a daughter of Gilbert Warde and Lady Elizabeth Wood, the courtesy title borne by her mother suggesting the family's standing among the lesser gentry of Tudor England.

Marion's life was spent wholly within the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an age that saw the consolidation of the Church of England, the flowering of English letters, and the gathering maritime ambitions that would shortly carry English settlers across the Atlantic. The Suffolk of her childhood was a country of prosperous wool towns and ancient parish churches; the Devonshire in which she ended her days lay at the western edge of the realm, its harbors busy with the trade and warfare that defined the late Tudor decades. That her birthplace and place of death lay at such a distance from one another suggests the movement of a family of some means, likely tied to her marriage.

She was joined in matrimony to Gilbert Hix II, and of that union is recorded a son, Gilbert E. Hicks (the surname rendered variously as Hicks or Hix in the surviving registers), who died in 1640. Through this son the Hicks line was carried forward across the generations and, in due course, into the New World, where descendants would mingle with the other families gathered into the present record.

Marion Warde was a thirteen-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-paternal line, and through her are inherited the early English roots of the Hicks branch of the family.