Joan (Joane) (Jone) Leazing (Leasing)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Joan (Joane) Leazing (1610–1674), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her English birth, parentage, transatlantic migration to colonial Massachusetts, marriage to John Edmund Needham, and her descendants. Notable: early 17th-century English emigrant to Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts, during the Great Puritan Migration era.

Joan Leazing, sometimes recorded as Joane or Jone, and her surname variously spelled Leasing, lived from 1610 to 1674. She was born on the 28th of October, 1610, in Hampstead — then a village in the parish system north of London, now absorbed into the London Borough of Camden. Her parents were Richard Thomas Leazing, who died in 1651, and Joan Lowe, who outlived her daughter, passing in 1675. The shared given name between mother and daughter was a common practice in English families of the period, reinforcing maternal lineage across generations.

Joan came of age during a period of profound religious and political upheaval in England. The decades surrounding her youth witnessed the strains between Crown and Parliament, the rise of Puritan dissent, and the Great Migration that carried thousands of English families across the Atlantic to the shores of New England between 1620 and 1640. It was within this current that Joan's own life eventually shifted westward.

She married John Edmund Needham, and from their union came at least one son of record, Daniel Nathaniel Needham, born in 1638 and living a long life until 1717. The Needham family established themselves in Lynn, in Essex County, Massachusetts — a coastal town settled in 1629 and known in the seventeenth century for its tanneries, ironworks, and shoemaking trades. Lynn lay only a short distance from Salem and Boston, placing the household within the cultural and ecclesiastical orbit of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Joan died in Lynn on the 24th of October, 1674, four days short of her sixty-fourth birthday. Her mother in England survived her by less than a year. Through her son Daniel, the Needham line carried forward into the broader fabric of colonial New England and, generations later, into the compiler's own ancestry.

Joan was the compiler's eleventh great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.