Richard Jones

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Jones (?–1681), an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Welsh birth, marriage to Ann Jefferies, his son and successor Richard G. Jones II, his death in Devon, and historical context of late Tudor and Stuart Wales and England during a turbulent century of religious and political upheaval.

Richard Jones, born in 1570 at Gottaken in the county of Denby, Wales, and departing this life in 1681 at Manor Ley in Devon, England, stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, an 11× great-grandfather whose long span of years bridged the closing decades of the Tudor age and the latter reign of Charles II.

The Wales of his birth lay under the rule of Elizabeth I, a kingdom newly joined to England by the Acts of Union and still adjusting to the consolidations of Tudor governance. The Welsh gentry and yeomanry of that era held strongly to kinship and parish, and the surname Jones — drawn from the patronymic 'John's son' — had by then become among the most widespread in the principality. Of Richard's own parentage the family record is silent, and no occupation or station has been preserved to us.

He took to wife Ann Jefferies, and of their union there is recorded a son, Richard G. Jones II, born in 1610 and surviving his father by but two years, dying in 1683. That the younger Richard bore his father's Christian name, with the addition of a middle initial in later transcription, suggests the customary patrilineal honor of the age.

The long arc of Richard's life, if the dates be accurate, encompassed the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the Restoration under Charles II. He would have witnessed, from afar or near, the English Civil Wars, the religious dissent that drove many of his countrymen to the New World, and the great plague and fire of London in the 1660s. That his final years were spent at Manor Ley in Devon, rather than in his native Denbighshire, indicates a removal from Wales into the West Country of England at some point in his life, though the occasion of that migration is not preserved.

Richard was the compiler's 11× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.