John S Goodwin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John S Goodwin (1555–1600), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Norfolk, marriage to Elizabeth Woodgate, his death in Suffolk, and the son who carried the line forward. Notable: an Elizabethan-era English ancestor whose generation stood at the threshold of the great Puritan migrations.

John S Goodwin (1555–1600) entered the world on the thirtieth of November, 1555, in the parish of North Burlingham, Norfolk, England — a small community in the marshy broads country of East Anglia, lying within the Diocese of Norwich. He was born in the second year of the reign of Mary I, and would live through the long and consequential Elizabethan age that followed, an era in which Norfolk and Suffolk together formed one of the most populous, prosperous, and religiously restless regions of the English realm.

In the course of his lifetime John was united in marriage to Elizabeth Woodgate, and from their union came at least one recorded son, Daniel G Goodwin, born in 1600 — the very year of his father's death. Daniel himself would live only until 1625, yet he carried forward the Goodwin name and, through his descendants, the line that would in time cross the Atlantic and ultimately find its way into the compiler's own ancestry.

John died on the tenth of May, 1600, at East Bergholt in the Babergh district of Suffolk — a parish later made famous by the painter John Constable, set in the gentle valley of the River Stour along the Suffolk-Essex border. That his life ended in Suffolk while it had begun in Norfolk suggests the modest mobility characteristic of yeoman and tradesmen families of the East Anglian counties, where ties of trade, kinship, and worship knit the region into a single cultural fabric. The closing years of the sixteenth century in which he died were turbulent ones: the Spanish Armada had been turned back only a dozen years before, Puritan dissent was steadily rising in East Anglia, and the great Protestant migrations to the New World lay only a generation in the future.

John S Goodwin was the compiler's twelve-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.