Audrey Harvey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Audrey Harvey (1558–1634), a twelve-times great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her London birth and death, her parentage in the Harvey and Kellet families, her single recorded daughter Ann Jefferies, and the broader context of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. Notable: her life spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and into Charles I.

Audrey Harvey (1558–1634) stands among the earliest English forebears recorded in the Hyten family register, taking her place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a twelve-times great-grandmother. She was born in 1558 in London, Middlesex, England, to Thomas Harvey and Alice Kellet, and died in 1634 in that same great city — by curious coincidence, the same year in which her mother Alice likewise passed from this life.

Her birth year placed her among the first generation of Elizabethans. The London of Audrey's childhood was a walled medieval city of perhaps one hundred thousand souls, soon to swell dramatically over the course of her lifetime; it was a city of timbered houses, narrow lanes, and the Thames as its great thoroughfare. The Church of England, established under Elizabeth I, had only recently settled into the form Audrey would have known from infancy, and the religious controversies of the age formed the backdrop of every parish in the realm.

Audrey lived through the long Elizabethan settlement, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the accession of the Stuart kings beginning with James I in 1603, and the early years of Charles I's troubled reign. London during these decades grew into one of Europe's principal capitals, expanding far beyond its medieval walls, and witnessed the flowering of the English stage and the King James translation of the Scriptures.

The family record preserves the name of one daughter, Ann Jefferies, who survived her mother by a decade, dying in 1644. Through Ann, the Harvey line continued forward across generations and oceans, eventually joining the streams of ancestry that converged in the Hyten family of later centuries.

Audrey was the compiler's twelve-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather line.