Elizabeth Symons

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Symons (1632–1678), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Nantwich, Cheshire, England, her marriage to Edward Smith, her daughter Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson, and the historical setting of 17th-century Cheshire. Notable: deep English ancestry predating the family's transatlantic chapters.

Elizabeth Symons was born before the 2nd of September 1632, in the market town of Nantwich, Cheshire, England, and departed this life before the 6th of December 1678 in Macclesfield, also in Cheshire. Her life of some forty-six years was passed within the boundaries of a single English county, in a region long renowned for its salt-springs, its dairy pastures, and the silk-and-textile trades that would, in the generations following her, transform Macclesfield into a center of industry.

The Cheshire of Elizabeth's lifetime was a country shaken by upheaval. She was born on the eve of the English Civil Wars, which engulfed the kingdom from 1642 onward, and Nantwich itself became the site of a notable parliamentary engagement in January of 1644. Her later years unfolded under the restored monarchy of Charles II, an age marked by the Great Plague, the Fire of London, and the slow easing of the religious dissensions that had so lately convulsed the realm. That she lived her full span in Cheshire suggests a household rooted in the customs and parishes of that ancient county.

Elizabeth was joined in marriage to Edward Smith, and of their union there is recorded a daughter, Elizabeth Hester Smith, born in 1665. The younger Elizabeth would in time marry into the Johnson family and is reported to have attained the remarkable age of one hundred and two years, surviving until 1767 — a lifespan that bridged the world of her mother's Stuart England and the eve of the American Revolution.

Elizabeth Symons herself did not live to see her daughter come of age, passing while the child was yet in her thirteenth year. Her name endures in the family register as one of the deep English roots from which the later American branches were drawn. Elizabeth was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.