Susan Freshwater

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susan Freshwater (1611–1643), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in England, marriage to Edwardi Freshwater, the birth of her son Thomas I Freshwater, her early death at Great Warley in Essex, and the broader context of early Stuart England.

Susan Freshwater (1611–1643) was born in England in the early years of the Stuart era, during the reign of King James I. Though the precise parish of her birth has not been preserved in the family record, her later life is anchored firmly in the county of Essex, in the southeast of England, where she would marry, raise her son, and die at a still-young age.

Susan was joined in marriage to Edwardi Freshwater, and from this union came at least one recorded child: Thomas I Freshwater, born in 1633 and surviving until 1694. Through Thomas the Freshwater line would carry forward into succeeding generations, eventually flowing into the broader ancestry of the compiler's paternal-grandfather branch.

The England in which Susan lived was a kingdom in profound religious and political upheaval. The 1630s and early 1640s saw the deepening quarrel between Crown and Parliament that would erupt, in the very year before her death, into the English Civil War. Essex, where Susan made her home, leaned strongly toward the Parliamentary cause, and the eastern counties bore the early brunt of recruitment, taxation, and divided loyalties. Plague and recurrent epidemics likewise stalked English towns and villages in this decade, and childbirth itself remained a leading cause of death for women of her station.

Susan died on 14 November 1643 at Great Warley, a small parish in southwestern Essex lying between Brentwood and the Thames marshes. She was only thirty-two years of age. Her son Thomas was then but ten years old, and would grow to adulthood in a country transformed first by civil war and then by the brief Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell.

While much of Susan's daily life lies beyond what the surviving record can recover, her place in the family pedigree is secure. Susan Freshwater stands as a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an early English root of the family tree more than four centuries removed.