Susan ann Whiting

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susan Ann Whiting (1505–1555), a 13× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Suffolk, her mother Katherine, her marriage to Sir Robert Lufkin, her daughter Mary Luffkin, and her death at Boxford. Notable: Tudor-era English origins of the family, traceable to early-sixteenth-century Suffolk.

Susan Ann Whiting (1505–1555) was born in the county of Suffolk, England, in the opening decade of the sixteenth century, a daughter of a woman recorded in the family register only as Katherine. She lived her full span of fifty years within Suffolk, departing this life in 1555 at Boxford, the parish in which her later years appear to have been settled.

Her lifetime traced the great convulsions of Tudor England. Born in the reign of Henry VII, she came of age during the long and tempestuous reign of Henry VIII, lived through the brief Protestant ascendancy under the boy-king Edward VI, and closed her days during the Catholic restoration under Queen Mary I. Suffolk in those decades was a prosperous wool and cloth-making region, dotted with parish churches whose spires had stood since the medieval centuries, and Boxford itself was a small but thriving cloth town in the valley of the Box. The religious upheavals of dissolution, reform, and counter-reform shaped daily life in every Suffolk parish during her years.

Susan Ann married Sir Robert Lufkin, and from that union came a daughter, Mary Luffkin, through whom the family line descends into the compiler's ancestry. The variant spellings of the Lufkin and Luffkin surnames, as preserved in the register, reflect the unstandardized orthography characteristic of English records before the seventeenth century.

Few personal details of Susan Ann's life survive in the family record beyond these essential particulars of birth, parentage, marriage, motherhood, and burial. Yet her place in the lineage is firmly fixed: through her daughter Mary, her blood passes down through the generations of the Whiting and allied families, eventually crossing the Atlantic to take root in the New World, and at length finding its way into the compiler's own paternal-grandfather line.

Susan Ann Whiting stands as a thirteenth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the PP line, among the earliest English forebears recorded in this archive.