Mary 16 Sicklemore

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Sicklemore (1605–1698), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Sussex, marriage to John Cox, her son John Scott Lynn Cox, her long life spanning nearly the whole of the seventeenth century, and the English social and religious context of her era.

Mary Sicklemore was born in 1605 in the village of Lindfield, in the county of Sussex, England, and lived a remarkably long life, passing from this world about 1698 in Surrey at the great age of ninety-three. Her years thus encompassed nearly the whole of the seventeenth century — an age of upheaval in England that saw the reigns of James I, Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth under Cromwell, the Restoration of Charles II, and the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne. The Sussex of her birth was a settled, agriculturally rich county of the Weald, marked by parish life, the rhythms of the seasons, and the long shadow of the established Church.

Mary married John Cox, and from their union came a son, John Scott Lynn Cox, born in 1625 and living until 1700. That her son's life and her own ran nearly parallel in length suggests a family marked by unusual longevity in an era when many did not see their fortieth year.

The particulars of Mary's daily life — her household, her faith, her trials and consolations — have not come down through the family record, as is so often the case with women of her century, whose lives were lived in the domestic sphere and seldom set down in the public chronicles. What endures is the fact of her presence: a Sussex-born woman who outlived her husband's generation, witnessed the transformation of England, and carried forward a lineage that would, generations later, find its way across the Atlantic and into the families whose names fill these pages.

Mary Sicklemore was the compiler's 11× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.