Thomas Chadwell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Chadwell (1611–1683), an eleven-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English origins in Gloucestershire, transatlantic settlement at Lynn in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, marriage to Margaret Breed, and a single recorded daughter. Notable: among the earliest Puritan-era English emigrants in the compiler's ancestry, with a documented Cotswold birthplace.

Thomas Chadwell (1611–1683) stands among the earliest English forebears traceable in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, his life bridging two worlds — the soft Cotswold hills of his birth and the rocky shore of colonial New England, where he ended his days. He was born in the year 1611 at Little Barrington, in the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire, England, a region of honey-colored stone villages and wool-trade prosperity in the closing years of the reign of King James I.

Thomas came of age during the turbulent decades that preceded and accompanied the English Civil Wars, an era in which religious dissent, political upheaval, and the lure of the New World drew thousands of Englishmen across the Atlantic. By the time of his death, he had become a settler of Lynn, in Essex County, Massachusetts — one of the early Puritan towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1629 just north of Boston along the coast. Lynn in the seventeenth century was a community of farmers, shoemakers, and ironworkers, knit together by the meetinghouse and the strict ordering of Puritan civic life.

Thomas married Margaret Breed, joining his line to the Breed family, a surname long associated with the Lynn settlement. From this union is recorded a daughter, Ruth Chadwell, born in 1640, who in time married into the Needham family and lived until 1719, carrying the Chadwell blood forward into succeeding generations.

Thomas Chadwell died on the 27th of February, 1683, at Lynn, having lived some seventy-two years — a notable span for his century. Through his daughter Ruth, his line descends across more than three hundred years and eleven generations to reach the compiler of this register, for whom Thomas stands as an eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.