Elizabeth Mellynge

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Mellynge (1581–c.1619), a twelve-times great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Suffolk birth, clerical parentage, marriage to Robert Lowseley, motherhood of Alice, and her early death in London. Notable: deepest English roots of the PP line, reaching into Elizabethan-Jacobean Suffolk and the household of an English rector.

Elizabeth Mellynge, born on the twenty-seventh of October, 1581, in the parish of Somerleyton in Suffolk, England, and gathered to her fathers about the year 1619 in the City of London, occupies a venerable place among the earliest documented ancestors of the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. She entered the world in the closing decades of the long reign of Elizabeth I, a time when rural Suffolk remained a settled patchwork of agricultural parishes, market towns, and country churches, and when the established Church of England was still consolidating its forms following the Reformation of the previous generation.

She was the daughter of the Reverend William Mellynge, a rector who survived her by more than a decade, dying in 1632. As the child of a clergyman of the Church of England, Elizabeth would have been raised within the orderly cadence of a country parsonage, an environment that in that era commonly afforded daughters at least the rudiments of literacy and religious instruction, though such matters concerning her specifically are not recorded in the family papers.

Elizabeth was joined in matrimony to Robert Lowseley, the second of that name in his line. To this union was born at least one daughter who descends in the family record: Alice Marchell Lowesley, who lived until 1639 and through whom the Mellynge blood passed forward into succeeding English generations and, eventually, across the Atlantic to the American branches of the family.

Elizabeth's life appears to have ended in the City of London about 1619, when she could scarcely have reached her thirty-eighth year. The early seventeenth-century capital was a crowded and often perilous place, beset by recurrent visitations of plague and other contagions that fell heavily upon women of childbearing age; whether such circumstances attended her own passing the record does not say.

Elizabeth Mellynge stands as a twelve-times great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.