Mary Luffkin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Luffkin (1530–1577), a 12× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Boxford, Suffolk, England; her parentage; her marriage to Sir John Brand; and her daughter Bridget Brand. Notable: among the earliest documented Tudor-era English ancestors in the compiler's lineage.

Mary Luffkin (1530–1577) stands among the earliest firmly documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, her life unfolding entirely within the Tudor century in the parish of Boxford, Suffolk, England. She was born in Boxford in 1530, the daughter of Sir Robert Lufkin and Susan Ann Whiting, and there she remained until her death on 16 July 1577, at the age of approximately forty-seven.

The Suffolk of Mary's lifetime was a region of considerable consequence in sixteenth-century England. Its market towns and clothiers' villages — Boxford among them — formed part of the prosperous wool and broadcloth country that bound East Anglia to the wider Continental trade. Her years also spanned the great religious convulsions of the English Reformation: born during the reign of Henry VIII, she would have lived through the brief Protestant ascendancy under Edward VI, the Marian restoration of Catholicism, and at last the Elizabethan settlement under which she died. Boxford itself, like much of Suffolk, leaned strongly toward reformed religion in this period.

Mary married Sir John Brand, and through this union the Luffkin line was joined to the Brand family of Suffolk. Of their issue, the record preserves a daughter, Bridget Brand, who survived her mother by more than half a century and lived until 1632, carrying the lineage forward into the Stuart age and, in due course, toward the generations that would cross the Atlantic.

The details of Mary's daily life — her household, her devotions, the particular cast of her character — lie beyond what the surviving record discloses. What remains is the firm scaffolding of dates, places, and kin: a Suffolk gentlewoman of the mid-Tudor era, rooted in a single parish from cradle to grave, and a vital link in the chain of descent.

Mary Luffkin was the compiler's 12× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.