Anne Bush

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anne Bush (1688–1763), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Cumberland, her marriage to Thomas Smith, her daughter Elizabeth, her death in Derbyshire, and historical context of late Stuart and Hanoverian England.

Anne Bush, born about the year 1688 in the parish of Alston, in the county of Cumberland, England, and departed this life on the nineteenth day of February, 1763, in Derby, Derbyshire, having attained the venerable age of approximately seventy-five years. Through her descendants she occupies a place of quiet importance in the compiler's paternal-grandmother (PM) line, standing nine generations removed as a great-grandparent of the compiler.

The Cumberland of Anne's nativity was a remote and rugged country in the far north of England, marked by the high fells of the Pennines and the lead-mining settlements that clustered about Alston Moor. Born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, which brought William and Mary to the English throne, Anne entered a kingdom in the midst of profound political and religious reordering. Her childhood and youth unfolded during the reigns of William III and of Queen Anne, an age of expanding commerce and recurring continental wars.

She was joined in marriage to Thomas Smith, and of this union there is recorded at least one daughter, Elizabeth Smith, born in the year 1708 and surviving until 1788. Whether further issue blessed the household has not been preserved in the records available to this archive.

At some point in her life Anne removed, or was removed by circumstance, from the northern uplands of Cumberland to the Midland county of Derbyshire, a journey of considerable distance in an age when travel was slow and arduous. Derby in the early and middle eighteenth century was a flourishing market town, soon to become one of the earliest centers of the English silk and textile industries. It was there, in that midland town, that Anne closed her long life in the winter of 1763, during the reign of George III and in the closing months of the Seven Years' War.

Anne Bush was the compiler's nine-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.