Gilbert E. Hicks\Hix

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Gilbert E. Hicks (also rendered Hix) (1585–1640), an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Devon, marriage to Elizabeth Townes, his son Richard Edward Hicks, his death at Bridgerule, and historical context of late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart Devon. Notable: deep English ancestry preceding the family's later American settlement.

Gilbert E. Hicks — whose surname appears in the parish records under both the spellings Hicks and Hix, as was common before orthography was standardized — was born on the 21st of May, 1585, at Thornbury, in the county of Devon, England. He passed from this life on the 23rd of September, 1640, at Bridgerule, also in Devon, having lived a span of fifty-five years across two reigns and the better part of an age.

His lifetime bridged a remarkable era in English history. Born in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth I, only three years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Gilbert came of age in a Devon shaped by maritime ambition, expanding Atlantic trade, and the rising influence of the Protestant church in rural parish life. The Devonshire of his manhood was a country of small market towns, hedged fields, and stone parish churches, where families such as the Hicks were rooted by generations of baptism, marriage, and burial recorded in a single register.

Gilbert married Elizabeth Townes, and of their union the family record preserves one son, Richard Edward Hicks (variously Hix), born in 1617 and surviving his father by twenty years until his death in 1660. Through this son the Hicks line would in time cross the Atlantic and descend, generation by generation, into the American branches that the present compiler now traces.

Gilbert's death at Bridgerule in 1640 came on the eve of the English Civil War, which would erupt only two years later and divide Devon, as it did the kingdom, between King and Parliament. He did not live to see those upheavals, nor the later emigrations that would carry his posterity overseas. Yet his place in the family register stands as one of the earliest firmly dated forebears in this line.

Gilbert was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.