Ann (Immigrant) Gale

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ann (Immigrant) Gale (1615–1678), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her English birth, transatlantic immigration, marriage to Reginald Reynold Jenkins, her known issue, and her death in colonial Maine. Notable: she was an immigrant ancestor crossing from Somerset, England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century.

Ann Gale, born in the year 1615 in the parish of Broomfield, Somerset, England, stands among the earliest immigrant ancestors recorded in the Hyten family register. Her early life unfolded in the West Country of England during the troubled reign of James I and the gathering storms that would erupt in the English Civil War — an age of religious dissent, economic upheaval, and a steady outward migration of English families toward the New World. It was within this turbulent generation that Ann crossed the Atlantic, joining the swelling tide of English settlers who established themselves along the rocky coasts of New England.

She was united in marriage to Reginald Reynold Jenkins, himself an immigrant of the same generation, sometimes recorded under the name Agnes. Of this union, the family record preserves the name of their son Jabez H. Jenkins, born in 1655 and living until 1697, who carried the family line forward into the latter decades of the seventeenth century.

Ann's later years were spent in Kittery, in York County, Maine — then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and one of the northernmost outposts of English settlement on the North American mainland. Kittery in this period was a hardy frontier community of fishermen, mariners, and small farmers, exposed both to the harshness of the northern climate and to the intermittent dangers of the colonial frontier wars. It was in this settlement that Ann passed from this life on the tenth day of February, 1678, at the age of sixty-three, having lived through the founding generation of New England and witnessed the establishment of a new colonial society her descendants would inherit.

In the genealogical reckoning of this register, Ann (Gale) Jenkins was the compiler's tenth great-grandmother along the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, and one of the immigrant progenitors from whom the family's English roots in Somerset descend.