Nathaniel Branson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nathaniel Branson (1644–1720), a nine-times great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth and death in Berkshire, his marriage to Mary Bacon, his son William 'Thomas' Branson, and historical context of seventeenth-century Berkshire. Notable: the family's English origin point preceding later Branson migration to the American colonies.

Nathaniel Branson (1644–1720) stood at the English wellspring of the Branson line that would, in later generations, find its way across the Atlantic and into the genealogical record of the Hyten family. He was born in 1644 in Berkshire, England, and there he lived out the full span of his seventy-six years, dying on the 14th of September, 1720, at Reading, the principal market town of that county.

The Berkshire of Nathaniel's lifetime was a country shaped by tumult and recovery. He was born in the midst of the English Civil Wars, an infancy passed under the shadow of Parliamentarian and Royalist contest, and he came to manhood in the years following the Restoration of 1660. Reading itself, set astride the Thames and the Kennet, was a town of cloth, malt, and inland trade, a place where dissenting religious currents — Quaker, Baptist, and Independent — quietly took root during precisely the decades of Nathaniel's adult life. Whether he himself was touched by those movements the present record does not say, though the later migration patterns of his descendants are suggestive of such sympathies among the broader Branson kin.

Nathaniel married Mary Bacon, and of their union the family register preserves the name of one son: William, called Thomas, Branson, born in 1684 and living until 1760. Through this William "Thomas" Branson the line is carried forward into the eighteenth century and onward to the American branches from which the compiler descends.

Nathaniel passed from this life at Reading in the autumn of 1720, having seen the close of the Stuart age and the early years of the Hanoverian succession. His grave lies, so far as is known, in the soil of his native Berkshire, where he had been born, married, raised his son, and at length died.

Nathaniel was the compiler's nine-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.