benjamin Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Benjamin Johnson (b. abt. 1625, d. unknown), an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his approximate birth, his marriage to Catherine Thompson, his son Dr. Archibald Johnson, and the broader era context of the early-to-mid seventeenth century in which he lived.

Benjamin Johnson, born about the year 1625, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line. The exact date and place of his birth have not been preserved in the family record, nor has the date of his death, though the survival of his name and approximate year of birth across so many generations is itself a quiet testimony to the regard in which his descendants held him.

He took to wife Catherine Thompson, and of this union there was issue at least one son of distinction, Archibald Johnson, born about 1650 and known in the family memory as Dr. Archibald Johnson. That a son of Benjamin's household should have pursued and attained the title of doctor — at a period when formal medical training was the privilege of a narrow few — suggests a family of some standing, or at the least of sufficient means and inclination to value learning. Archibald's comparatively short life, ending about 1680, is recorded elsewhere in this register.

The seventeenth century into which Benjamin Johnson was born was an age of profound upheaval. England in the 1620s lay under the reign of Charles I, soon to be consumed by civil war, regicide, and the Commonwealth under Cromwell; the Atlantic world was likewise stirring, with English colonies but newly planted at Plymouth and Jamestown, and Puritan dissenters streaming toward Massachusetts Bay. Whether Benjamin passed his days upon English soil or among the early colonial settlements the archive does not say, and the biographer declines to invent what the records do not declare.

What may be said with confidence is that Benjamin Johnson and Catherine Thompson together stand at a remote and venerable point in the family tree, the wellspring from which a long line of descendants would in due course flow. Benjamin was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.