Marie A. Rasmussen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Marie A. Rasmussen (1504–1598), a sixteen-times great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Durham, her death in London, her single recorded child, and the broader context of Tudor and Elizabethan England. Notable: an exceptionally long life spanning nearly the whole of the sixteenth century.

Marie A. Rasmussen (1504–1598) was born on the thirtieth of May in the year 1504 in Durham, in the north of England, and lived an extraordinary span of nearly ninety-four years before her death in 1598 in the parish of St Nicholas, Cole Abbey, London. Her life thus reached across almost the whole of the sixteenth century, beginning in the early reign of King Henry VII and closing in the final years of Queen Elizabeth I.

Durham at the opening of the sixteenth century was a cathedral city of the old palatinate, dominated by the prince-bishops and shaped by the medieval rhythms of religious and civic life. Marie was born into an England that was still firmly Catholic, and she would, in the course of her long life, witness the upheavals of the English Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the brief Catholic restoration under Mary I, and the Elizabethan settlement that defined the Church of England in its enduring form. To live from 1504 to 1598 was to see, in a single lifetime, the medieval world recede and the early modern English state take shape.

Her later years were spent in London, in the parish of St Nicholas, Cole Abbey, an ancient church in the heart of the City near the Thames. The London of her final decades was the bustling Elizabethan capital — a center of commerce, theatre, and overseas ambition — far removed in temper from the northern cathedral town of her birth.

Marie is recorded as the mother of Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton, through whom her line descended into the gentry of the West Country and ultimately, across many generations and the Atlantic, into the Hyten family of the compiler's own day.

Marie A. Rasmussen stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a sixteen-times great-grandmother, one of the most distant ancestresses preserved by name within the family record.