Mary * Bacon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary * Bacon (1656–1692), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Berkshire, her marriage to Nathaniel Branson, her son Thomas, and the late-Stuart English context of her life. Notable: surname is flagged as an unverified Ancestry hint and should be treated with appropriate caution.

Mary Bacon, whose surname is here preserved with an asterisk to denote an unverified Ancestry hint awaiting documentary corroboration, was born on the eighth day of December in the year 1656, in the village of Blewbury, in the county of Berkshire, England. She departed this life on the thirty-first of October, 1692, at Reading in the same county, having attained but thirty-five years of age.

The England into which Mary was born was a kingdom newly emerged from civil war and the brief Commonwealth under Cromwell; her infancy coincided with the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. Berkshire in this era was a landscape of chalk downs, market towns, and parish churches, with Reading serving as a principal centre of trade along the Thames. The latter half of the seventeenth century brought to Berkshire households the Great Plague of 1665, the disruptions of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the steady tightening of parish recordkeeping that has allowed even modest families to be traced across the centuries.

Mary was joined in marriage to Nathaniel Branson, and from that union came a son, William "Thomas" Branson, born in 1684. Thomas would live a remarkably long life, surviving until 1760, and through him the Branson line was carried forward into subsequent generations of the family whose descendants would eventually cross the Atlantic.

Mary did not live to see her son reach full manhood; her death in 1692 left Thomas a child of but eight years. The cause of her early passing is not recorded in the materials available to the compiler, though early mortality among women of childbearing years was a common sorrow of the age.

Mary Bacon stands as a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. The asterisk attached to her surname is retained as an honest caution: her identity as a Bacon rests upon an Ancestry hint not yet confirmed by primary record.