Henry Warnell\Warnal

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Henry Warnell (also rendered Warnal) (1610–1670), an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth and death, the variant spelling of the family surname, his son John Warnell, and the broader context of seventeenth-century England in which he lived.

Henry Warnell, whose surname appears in family records under the variant spelling Warnal, was born in 1610 in England and died there about 1670. He stands at a remote but important station along the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of an eleven-times great-grandfather. Of his parentage, his trade, and the particular parish or shire in which he passed his sixty years, the family record preserves no testimony, and the present account therefore confines itself to what may safely be said.

The England into which Henry was born was one of profound disturbance and transformation. His youth fell beneath the late reign of James I and the early reign of Charles I; his middle years spanned the upheavals of the English Civil War, the execution of the king in 1649, and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell; and his closing decade lay under the restored monarchy of Charles II. The plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 likewise belonged to his lifetime. Whether he was touched directly by any of these calamities the record does not say, but they form the unavoidable backdrop of any English life of his generation.

The only descendant preserved to the family record is his son, John Warnell, born in 1630 and living to the remarkable age of ninety-five, dying in 1725. Through John the Warnell line carried forward into later generations and, in time, into the broader paternal ancestry of the Hyten family in America. The variant rendering of the surname — Warnell and Warnal side by side — is consistent with the unsettled orthography of English parish registers in the seventeenth century, when names were spelled by ear.

Henry Warnell was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.