Edwardi Freshwater

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Edwardi Freshwater (1603–1660), a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Essex, England, his parentage, his marriage to Susan, his son Thomas I, and the early Stuart-era English context in which his life unfolded. Notable: he represents one of the family's deepest English roots, predating the line's eventual American settlement.

Edwardi Freshwater (1603–1660) was born in February of 1603 in Essex County, England, and he died on the sixteenth of October, 1660, in England, at the age of fifty-seven. He stands among the most distant English forebears recorded in this register, a ten-times great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line.

He was the son of Richard Edward Freshwater, who died in 1605 when Edwardi was scarcely two years of age, and of Bridget Brand, who survived her husband by some twenty-seven years and lived until 1632. Edwardi was thus raised in the shadow of early paternal loss, a circumstance not uncommon in an age when life expectancy and the hazards of illness rendered widowhood and orphanhood familiar conditions of English domestic life.

Essex in the early seventeenth century was a county of farming villages, market towns, and a rising Puritan religious temperament; it would become, within Edwardi's lifetime, one of the regions most touched by the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the upheavals that brought the execution of Charles I and the brief Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The greater part of Edwardi's adult years thus unfolded against a backdrop of religious contention, civil strife, and the eventual Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 — the very year of his death.

He married Susan Freshwater, and from their union the register records a son, Thomas I Freshwater, born in 1633 and living until 1694. Through this Thomas the Freshwater line was carried forward across the generations and, in due course, across the Atlantic, where later descendants would intermarry with the other families gathered in this archive.

Edwardi Freshwater was the compiler's ten-times great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal (PP) line.