Dianne ATWOOD

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Dianne Atwood (1520–1560), a 14× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Surrey, her marriage to Gilbert Hicks, her son Gilbert Hix II, her death in Wiltshire, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: among the earliest documented English forebears in the Hyten archive.

Dianne Atwood (1520–1560) stands among the earliest documented forebears recorded in the Hyten family archive, a 14× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. She was born on the 16th of September, 1520, in Sanderstead, Surrey, England, a parish of the chalk downlands south of London, in the early years of the reign of King Henry VIII. The England of her childhood was a realm still nominally tied to Rome, though within little more than a decade the king's break with the papacy and the dissolution of the monasteries would profoundly reshape the religious and civil landscape of every English parish, Sanderstead and its neighbors not excepted.

Dianne in due course married Gilbert Hicks, and through that union the Atwood and Hicks lines were joined. The marriage produced a son recorded in the family register as Gilbert Hix II, through whom her lineage carries forward into the long chain of descent that ultimately reaches the compiler. The slight variance in the surname — Hicks and Hix — reflects the unsettled orthography of the Tudor period, when family names were rendered phonetically by parish clerks and varied freely from one document to the next.

Her life closed on the 1st of February, 1560, at Stapleford in Wiltshire, the move westward from Surrey suggesting the household had taken root in the chalk valley of the Wylye by the time of her death. She would have lived through the brief reign of Edward VI and the Marian restoration, dying in the earliest months of Elizabeth I's long reign, when a newly Protestant settlement was once again being woven into English parish life. She was approximately thirty-nine years of age.

Dianne was the compiler's 14× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.