Edward Smith

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Edward Smith (1636–1696), an eleven-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Cheshire, England, his marriage to Elizabeth Symons, and his daughter Elizabeth Hester Smith. Notable: an English forebear of the seventeenth century, rooted in Macclesfield through both birth and burial.

Edward Smith was born on the 27th of March, 1636, in the parish of St. Michael in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, and there, some sixty years later, he closed his days, his death falling about the year 1696 in the very town of his nativity. That a man should live and die within the bounds of a single English parish was, in his century, neither remarkable nor exceptional; the seventeenth-century Cheshire yeomanry and tradesfolk commonly traced their whole earthly course within the orbit of one market town and its surrounding fields. Macclesfield in Edward's day was a settled borough of the Cheshire plain, known for its silk and button trades that would flourish in the generations following his own, and St. Michael's parish church stood, as it still stands, at the heart of the town's civic and spiritual life, presiding over its baptisms, marriages, and burials.

Edward took to wife Elizabeth Symons, and of their union the family record preserves the name of a daughter, Elizabeth Hester Smith, born in 1665 and afterward married into the Johnson family. Through this daughter the Smith line passed forward into succeeding generations, eventually reaching across the Atlantic and joining at last with the American branches that flow into the compiler's own ancestry.

Edward's lifetime spanned a turbulent stretch of English history. He was born during the reign of Charles I, in the years immediately preceding the Civil Wars that would convulse the realm; he came to manhood under the Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Cromwell; he saw the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the accession of William and Mary. Whether and how these national upheavals touched his life in the Cheshire parish, the surviving record does not say, but no Englishman of his generation lived wholly apart from them.

Edward Smith was an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.