Peter Patrick Henrysoune Henry

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Peter Patrick Henrysoune Henry (b. 1590, death unknown), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Edinburgh, his marriage to Barbara Lindsay Johnston Henrysoune, his daughter Marion, the era context of late-Reformation Scotland, and the surname evolution from Henrysoune to Henderson.

Peter Patrick Henrysoune Henry was born in the year 1590 in Edinburgh Parish, Edinburgh, in the county of Midlothian, Scotland. The precise date of his death has not survived in the family record, though tradition places his final years likewise within the bounds of Edinburgh Parish, the same ground that had received him at his birth.

The Edinburgh of Peter's lifetime was the burgh-capital of a kingdom newly entwined with England through the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland ascended also to the English throne. It was an age of religious settlement following the Scottish Reformation, when the Kirk had taken firm hold of parish life, and when the spelling of surnames remained fluid, often rendered in patronymic Scots forms before settling into the anglicised conventions of later generations. The name Henrysoune — literally "son of Henry" — would in due course be smoothed into Henderson, the form by which Peter's descendants would be known.

Peter was united in marriage to Barbara Lindsay Johnston Henrysoune, a daughter of the Scottish gentry whose maternal names of Lindsay and Johnston preserve in themselves the memory of two old Lowland houses. Of this union there survives in the family record one named child, a daughter, Marion Hendersoune, born in 1615 and living to the considerable age of seventy-three, dying in 1688. Through Marion the line was carried forward into a century that would see the Civil Wars, the Covenanting struggles, and eventually the great migrations westward by which the family would in time reach the American colonies.

Peter Patrick Henrysoune Henry stands at a great remove from the present compiler, being an eleven-times great-grandfather in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line of descent.