Elizabeth Woodgate

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Woodgate (1552–1600), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her Suffolk origins, her marriage to John Goodwin, the birth of her son Daniel Goodwin, and her death recorded at Hartford, Connecticut. Notable: she represents one of the family's earliest English-to-New England lines, bridging Elizabethan Suffolk and the founding generation of colonial Connecticut.

Elizabeth Woodgate (1552–1600) entered the world in the parish of East Bergholt, in the Babergh District of Suffolk, England, a region of gentle river country and prosperous wool and weaving villages along the Stour valley. The Suffolk of her childhood was the Suffolk of Elizabeth I — a county shaped by the upheavals of the Reformation, by an industrious cloth trade, and by the slow stirrings of Puritan conviction that would, within a generation, send so many of its sons and daughters across the Atlantic to the new English settlements in America.

In the course of her life Elizabeth was united in marriage to John S. Goodwin, and from that union came a son, Daniel Goodwin, born in the year 1600. Daniel's own life would be brief, ending in 1625, but through him the Goodwin line carried forward into the Connecticut colony and, in time, down through the long chain of descents that brought the family into the present register.

The record of Elizabeth's death is dated the tenth of May, 1600, at Hartford in the colony of Connecticut — a date that lies at the very threshold of the great English migration to New England, and one that, if accurate as preserved in the family papers, would place her among the earliest of the family's forebears to be associated with American soil. The proximity of her son's birth in the same year and her death so far from her Suffolk birthplace stands as one of the more striking notations in the archive, a reminder of how spare and at times difficult the earliest transatlantic records can be.

Elizabeth Woodgate was the compiler's 12× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, and one of the deepest English roots preserved in the Hyten family record.