benjamin Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Benjamin Johnson (1625–unknown), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his approximate birth year, marriage to Catherine Thompson, and his son Dr. Archibald Johnson. Context touches the early seventeenth century, an era of English colonial expansion and religious upheaval that shaped many of the compiler's earliest documented forebears.

Benjamin Johnson, born about the year 1625, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. The precise particulars of his birthplace, parentage, and date of death have not been preserved in the family record, a circumstance not uncommon for those whose lives unfolded in the first half of the seventeenth century, when parish registers were unevenly maintained and many family papers were lost to the disturbances of the age.

The early decades of the 1600s were a period of considerable movement and transformation in the English-speaking world. The reign of Charles I, the religious tensions that would culminate in the English Civil War, and the steady stream of emigration to the American colonies all framed the years of Benjamin's youth and maturity. Whether he remained in the Old World or numbered among those who crossed the Atlantic in that turbulent century, the surviving record does not say.

Benjamin was united in marriage to Catherine Thompson, a union from which at least one son is known to the family annals. That son, Archibald Johnson, born in 1650 and remembered with the title of Doctor, lived only thirty years before his death in 1680. The early loss of this son — assuming Benjamin survived him — would have been a heavy sorrow, though the record offers no testimony of the elder Johnson's response, nor indeed of how long he himself lived beyond it.

Though little of Benjamin Johnson's voice or daily circumstance has descended through the generations, his place in the lineage is secure. Through his son Dr. Archibald, and through the generations that followed, the Johnson line carried forward into the families that would, in time, join with the Hytens. Benjamin was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.