John Armour

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Armour (1552–1620), a twelve-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth and death in Canongate, his marriage, his daughter Elizabeth, and the late-Tudor and Jacobean Scottish context in which his life unfolded. Notable: among the earliest documented Scottish ancestors in the Hyten lineage.

John Armour (1552–1620) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, his life unfolding within the close-built precincts of Canongate, Edinburgh, in the county of Midlothian, Scotland. He was born there in 1552, and in that same burgh he died sixty-eight years later, in 1620, having apparently passed the whole of his life within the bounds of a single Scottish community.

The Canongate of John Armour's time was a burgh of regality lying just beyond the eastern wall of Edinburgh proper, stretching from the Netherbow down to the gates of Holyroodhouse. During his lifetime, Scotland passed through profound transformations: the personal reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, gave way to the long rule of her son James VI, who in 1603 united the crowns of Scotland and England and removed his court to London. The Reformation, established by statute in 1560 when John was a boy of about eight, reshaped the religious life of every Scottish burgh, and Canongate, with its proximity to the royal palace and to the reforming preachers of Edinburgh, sat near the center of these changes.

John Armour married a woman recorded in the family papers as Elizabeth, who took his surname in the fashion of the day. Of their household, the archive preserves the name of a daughter, Elizabeth Airmour, whose surname is rendered in one of the several orthographic variants — Armour, Airmour, Armor — by which the family appears in Scottish records of the period. It is through this daughter that the line descends to later generations and at length to the Hyten family of the New World.

No occupation, parentage, or further particulars are recorded for John Armour in the present archive. He survives in the family memory as the Canongate progenitor of the Armour strand, a twelve-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-paternal line.