Peter Noyes

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Peter Noyes (1630–1699), a 10× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic life in colonial Massachusetts, marriage to Elizabeth Darvill, and the daughter through whom the line descends. Notable: early Puritan-era settler of Sudbury, Middlesex County, in the first generations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Peter Noyes (1630–1699) was born on the 18th of January, 1630, in Southampton, Hampshire, on the southern coast of England. He came into the world at the very threshold of one of the great migratory movements of the seventeenth century: between roughly 1620 and 1640, thousands of English families — many of Puritan persuasion, many from the southern and eastern counties of England — crossed the Atlantic to settle the towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Southampton, as a principal port, sent forth a notable share of these emigrants, and Peter Noyes was among those whose lives bridged the two worlds of old England and New England.

He died in 1699 in Sudbury, in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, having lived nearly seventy years. Sudbury, established in 1639 along the Sudbury River west of Boston, was in his lifetime a frontier agricultural community of meetinghouses, common fields, and small homesteads; in the latter half of the seventeenth century it endured the upheavals of King Philip's War (1675–1676), which fell heavily upon the towns of central Massachusetts. Peter's residence in Sudbury placed him squarely within the fabric of that early colonial society.

He married Elizabeth Darvill, and from that union came a daughter, Dorothy Noyes, born in 1660 and living until 1719. It is through Dorothy that the line continues forward into the generations from which the compiler ultimately descends. The transmission of the surname Noyes, common to several allied New England families of the period, anchors this branch firmly within the colonial Massachusetts record.

Peter's lifespan — beginning in Stuart England and ending in the Massachusetts of the late Puritan era, on the eve of the eighteenth century — encompasses a remarkable arc of colonial history. He stood among the founding generations who carried English custom, faith, and family into the New World. Peter Noyes was the compiler's tenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.