Alice Kellet

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Kellet (d. 1634), a thirteen-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her marriage to Thomas Harvey, her daughter Audrey Harvey, her death in 1634, and the early seventeenth-century English context in which she lived. Notable: she and her daughter died in the same year.

Alice Kellet (date of birth unknown; died 1634) stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the paternal-grandfather line of the Hyten family register, reckoned as a thirteen-times great-grandmother of the compiler. The particulars of her birth, parentage, and place of origin have not been preserved in the archive, a circumstance not uncommon for women of her generation, whose names entered the written record chiefly through marriage, baptismal registers, and probate.

Alice was joined in marriage to Thomas Harvey, and from that union the archive preserves the name of one daughter, Audrey Harvey. Mother and daughter share the same year of death — 1634 — a coincidence that, while it cannot be explained from the data at hand, was a sorrow not unfamiliar to families of early seventeenth-century England, where epidemic disease, the lingering visitations of plague, and the ordinary hazards of childbirth often carried away kindred in close succession.

The England of Alice Kellet's lifetime was a land in profound transition. The reigns of Elizabeth I and James I had given way to that of Charles I, whose disputes with Parliament were drawing toward the great crisis of the Civil War. Puritan thought was spreading in the parishes, and across the Atlantic the first Puritan colonists had already begun their plantations in Massachusetts Bay. It was in such a world — religiously contested, politically uneasy, yet quickening with the impulses of emigration that would, generations later, plant her descendants in the New World — that Alice lived out her days.

Though little of her person can now be recovered, her place in the family lineage is secure. Through her daughter Audrey Harvey the line continued, and through that thread of descent the blood of Alice Kellet was carried forward across more than three centuries. Alice was a thirteen-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-paternal line.