Abigail Follett

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Abigail Follett (1566–1610), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her parentage, era context in late Tudor and early Stuart England, her place within the Follett family, and her son Reginald Jenkins, who later crossed the Atlantic. Notable: she stands among the earliest documented forebears in this branch, mother to an immigrant ancestor.

Abigail Follett (1566–1610) belonged to the deepest documented stratum of the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, standing as an eleven-times great-grandparent. The surviving record gives her birth in 1566 and her death in 1610, both noted in association with Kittery, York — a designation reflecting the genealogical tradition in which her descendants settled, though her life itself unfolded against the broader Atlantic world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an age shaped by the Elizabethan settlement, the rise of seafaring commerce, and the first stirrings of English colonial ambition in the New World.

She was the daughter of Frauncis Follit, who survived her by more than a decade and lived until 1623, and of Penticoste Easely, whose given name preserved an older English custom of naming children for the feast days of the church calendar. The Follett line itself was a well-attested West Country surname, and Abigail's place within it links the compiler's pedigree to that quietly enduring stock of English households whose generations turned with the seasons of parish and field.

Abigail was the mother of Reginald Reynold Jenkins (1608–1683), known in family tradition by the byname "Agnes" and remembered as the immigrant of his generation. His birth in 1608 placed him among Abigail's later years, and his eventual passage across the Atlantic would carry the Follett blood into the soil of colonial New England, where it would mingle in time with other founding lines of the region. Abigail herself did not live to witness that migration, dying in 1610 while her son was yet a small child — a circumstance not uncommon in an age when childbirth, fever, and the ordinary hazards of life cut many lives short before their natural span.

Abigail was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.