Jane Locker

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Locker (1600–1658), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-paternal (PP) line. This entry covers her probable birth in Cheshire, her marriage to John Symons, her daughter Elizabeth Symons, her death at Nantwich, and the broader context of early-seventeenth-century English provincial life. Notable: her life spanned the English Civil War era.

Jane Locker (1600–1658) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, holding the position of a twelfth great-grandmother on the PP branch of the family. She was born about the year 1600, possibly in the market town of Nantwich, Cheshire, in the English northwest — a region long known for its salt works, its timbered houses, and its dense parish records that have preserved so many names of her generation. Whether or not Nantwich was the precise place of her nativity, it was certainly the town in which her life would close.

Jane was joined in marriage to John Symons, and from that union came at least one recorded daughter, Elizabeth Symons, born in 1632 and living until 1678. It is through Elizabeth that Jane's line continued forward into the generations whose descendants would, in time, cross the Atlantic and contribute to the American branches of the family.

The years through which Jane lived were among the most turbulent in English memory. The reign of James I gave way to that of Charles I; the long quarrel between Crown and Parliament hardened into open civil war in the 1640s; and Cheshire itself, lying between Royalist and Parliamentary strongholds, saw the passage of armies and the disruption of ordinary parish life. Nantwich in particular was the site of a notable battle in January 1644. Jane would have been a woman in middle life during these upheavals, and she lived on to see the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell and very nearly the eve of the Restoration, though she did not survive to witness it.

Jane Locker died on the fourth of October, 1658, at Nantwich, in the same Cheshire town with which her life is most firmly associated. She was the compiler's twelfth great-grandmother on the paternal-paternal line.