Alice Brookman Mousall

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Brookman Mousall (1600–1657), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth in West Sussex, her transatlantic migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, her death at Concord, and her motherhood of Thomas Goble. Notable: early 17th-century English emigrant to Puritan New England.

Alice Brookman Mousall (1600–1657) stands among the earliest transatlantic forebears recorded in the Hyten family register, having been born on the fourth day of February, 1600, in the parish of Aldingbourne, in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. The South Downs country of her birth was, in that era, a region of small agricultural parishes still ordered by the rhythms of the Church of England and the seasonal labors of the Sussex countryside. Alice entered the world at the close of the Elizabethan age, only three years before the accession of James I — a period in which religious dissent in southern England was beginning to stir the currents that would, within a generation, carry many families across the Atlantic.

Alice was, by the surviving record, the mother of Thomas Goble, born in 1634 and surviving until 1690. Through this son the line of descent passes onward into the New England generations of the family. The years of Thomas's youth coincided with the Great Migration, during which thousands of English families departed the southern and eastern counties of England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

That Alice herself crossed the Atlantic is attested by the place of her death: Concord, in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where she died on the twenty-ninth of December, 1657, at the age of fifty-seven. Concord had been founded only in 1635, and in Alice's final years remained a frontier settlement of timber-framed houses, meetinghouse worship, and carefully apportioned planting fields. To have lived out her last days there marks her as one of the first-generation English settlers of the Bay Colony, having borne the considerable hardships of ocean passage and wilderness establishment.

Alice Brookman Mousall was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing among the most distant forebears whose names, dates, and places of life are preserved in this register.