Ann Hill

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ann Hill (circa 1550–1603), a thirteenth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Elizabethan England, her marriage to Robert Leazing (or Lesson), her son Richard Thomas Leazing, and her death in 1603. Notable: she represents one of the earliest English forebears recorded in the compiler's maternal-paternal English ancestry.

Ann Hill, born about the year 1550 in England and departing this life in 1603, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line. Her life unfolded almost entirely within the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an age in which the English parish register had only recently come into common use and in which the rhythms of village life — christenings, harvests, market days, and the tolling of the church bell — gave shape to the years of ordinary women whose names might otherwise have been lost to memory. That hers was preserved at all is a small mercy of the archive.

Of her parentage and birthplace no record survives in the family papers. The England into which she was born was one of profound religious transformation, the Elizabethan Settlement having only lately fixed the contours of the national church, and the countryside still bore the marks of the dissolution of the monasteries a generation earlier. Whether the Hill family were of yeoman, husbandman, or tradesman stock cannot now be determined from the surviving record.

She was joined in marriage to Robert Leazing, whose surname appears in the family records under the variant spelling Lesson — a not uncommon fluidity in an age when orthography followed the ear rather than the pen. Of this union there is recorded a son, Richard Thomas Leazing, whose own life would extend until 1651 and who would carry the line forward into the troubled years of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth.

Ann Hill closed her earthly course in 1603, the very year in which Elizabeth herself died and the crown passed to James Stuart of Scotland — a coincidence of timing that locates her passing precisely at the hinge between the Tudor and Stuart ages. Ann was the compiler's thirteenth-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.