Alice Marchell Lowesley

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Marchell Lowesley (1598–c.1639), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her London birth, parentage, marriage to George Bramham, sole recorded child, and the broader context of Jacobean and early Caroline England. Notable: she stands among the earliest English forebears documented in the Hyten paternal-grandfather lineage.

Alice Marchell Lowesley (1598–c.1639) was born in May of 1598 in the city of London, England, in the closing years of the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I. She was the daughter of Robert II Lowseley (d. 1625) and Elizabeth Mellynge (d. 1619), a London household whose particulars now survive only in the family register that preserves her name.

The London of Alice's childhood was a crowded and rapidly expanding metropolis, the commercial and political heart of England, where the late Tudor age gave way to the reign of James I in 1603. It was an era marked by the flowering of English drama, the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, and the first stirrings of English overseas colonization. A daughter raised in the capital during these decades would have come of age amid the religious tensions and civic ambitions that would, within a generation, propel England toward civil war.

Alice lost her mother, Elizabeth Mellynge, in 1619, when Alice was about twenty-one years of age; her father, Robert Lowseley, followed his wife to the grave in 1625. By that latter year the English throne had passed from James I to his son Charles I, whose troubled reign would dominate the remainder of Alice's lifetime.

Alice was joined in marriage to George Bramham. Of this union the family register preserves the record of one daughter, Sarah Michelle Bramman, born in 1629 and herself destined to live only until 1660. Through Sarah, the Lowesley line passed forward into the Bramham family and onward, across the Atlantic in due course, to the American branches whose descendants compiled this archive.

Alice died about the year 1639 in England, on the eve of the civil wars that would soon convulse the nation. Alice Marchell Lowesley was an eleven-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.