Margery Ash or Ann Null

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margery Ash or Ann Null (b. 1520, death date unknown), a 15× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Sussex, her marriage to Edwarde Pierce of Balcombe, her daughter Katherine, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: deep English Tudor-period ancestry predating the family's eventual American migration.

Margery Ash, also recorded in certain sources as Ann Null, was born in the year 1520 in the parish of Balcombe, in the county of Sussex, England. The precise date of her death has not been preserved in the family records, though tradition and surviving notation place her final years in the village of West Tarring, likewise in Sussex, suggesting that her life unfolded within the green and undulating landscape of the southern English downs.

She came into the world during the early reign of Henry VIII, a time when England remained outwardly bound to the Church of Rome, though the religious upheavals that would soon transform the realm were already gathering. The Sussex of her childhood was a settled agricultural country of small market towns, ancient parish churches, and timbered manor houses, its rhythms governed by the agricultural calendar and the ecclesiastical year. Women of her station typically passed their lives within a narrow compass of village, parish, and household, and Margery's recorded movements between Balcombe and West Tarring fall well within that pattern.

Margery was united in marriage to Edwarde Pierce of Balcombe, a union which appears to have rooted the family firmly in that parish. From this marriage came at least one daughter, Katherine, who bore the surname Balcombe in the records — a naming custom not uncommon in the period, when surnames were still in flux and place-names often attached themselves to descendants. Through Katherine the line would continue forward through the generations, eventually crossing the Atlantic in later centuries to take root in the soil of the American colonies and the early republic, where the threads of Margery's Sussex inheritance would in time be gathered into the Hyten family.

Margery Ash, or Ann Null, stands as a 15× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line — among the most distant English forebears whose names the family has carried forward.