Rose Mary Bellinger

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rose Mary Bellinger (c.1585–1605), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth and death, her marriage to James Sicklemore, the birth of her daughter Mary, and the Elizabethan-Jacobean era context of Surrey at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Rose Mary Bellinger (c.1585–1605) was born in England during the closing years of the Elizabethan age, a period in which the realm stood at the threshold of empire, with the first English ventures across the Atlantic yet to take lasting root. She lived the whole of her short life within her native country, and at her death in 1605, in the county of Surrey, she was a young woman of scarcely twenty years.

Rose was joined in marriage to James Sicklemore, a union that, though brief, produced at least one child whose line would endure. Their daughter, Mary Sicklemore, was born in 1605 — the same year that claimed her mother — and would live to the remarkable age of ninety-three, surviving until 1698. It is through this daughter that the Bellinger and Sicklemore names passed down through the generations into the compiler's paternal-grandfather line.

The Surrey of Rose's day lay just beyond the bustling reach of London, a county of market towns, parish churches, and gentle agricultural countryside, then under the new reign of King James I, who had ascended to the English throne in 1603. It was an England still adjusting to the passing of Queen Elizabeth, an England whose population was beset by recurrent visitations of plague and by the considerable hazards of childbirth, which carried away many young wives and mothers in the bloom of their years. Whether Rose was lost to such causes the surviving record does not say; only the coincidence of her death and her daughter's birth in the same year speaks, as such coincidences often do, in the language of suggestion rather than certainty.

Rose Mary Bellinger was a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and stands among the earliest English forebears whose name is preserved within this register.