Joan Payne

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Joan Payne (1562–1625), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her baptism and death in Lindfield, Sussex, her parents Richard Paine and Katherine Balcombe, her marriage to Thomas Cox, and her son John Cox. Notable: Elizabethan-era English ancestor whose son's generation would later figure in the great Atlantic migration.

Joan Payne (1562–1625) was born on the tenth of September, 1562, in the parish of Lindfield, in the Weald of Sussex, England, the daughter of Richard Paine, later known by the variant spelling Payne, who himself lived until 1638, and of his wife Katherine Balcombe. The family was rooted in that quiet corner of southeastern England where the names Payne and Balcombe had long appeared upon the parish rolls.

Joan was born into the early reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a period in which the English parish church served as the central register of life's passages — baptisms, marriages, and burials being inscribed by the local clergy in bound volumes that have, in many instances, survived to the present day. The Sussex Weald in the latter half of the sixteenth century was a landscape of small market towns, ironworking forges, and yeoman farmsteads, and the parish of Lindfield numbered among its long-settled communities. It was in this setting that Joan came of age, married, and lived out the entirety of her days.

She was wedded to Thomas Cox, and of their union is recorded a son, John Cox, born in 1605 and surviving to a considerable age, his death falling in 1690. Through this John Cox the Payne line was carried forward into succeeding generations of the family now gathered within this register.

Joan Payne died on the fifth of April, 1625, in the same parish of Lindfield in which she had been baptized nearly sixty-three years earlier — a span of life of unusual length for an Englishwoman of her century. Her passing came in the opening weeks of the reign of King Charles I, whose troubled rule would, within a generation, send many English families across the Atlantic to the New World.

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