Susanna Hewettson
Susanna Hewettson married Arthur Ward at the church of St Martin, Owston Ferry, on 27 June 1671, and with him raised a family a little inland at Epworth. The youngest of their children, another Susanna, carried her mother's name and married into the Brocks of Haxey — and so it is through this Susanna Hewettson that the line reaches back to the Ferry.
She was, in all likelihood, a daughter of that parish herself. The Hewetsons were an Owston family — at West Butterwick, within the same parish, and afterwards at Epworth — and a bride was most often married in her own church. But of Susanna's birth there is no record: she would have been born about the end of the 1640s, in the years when the Civil War and its aftermath broke the keeping of the parish registers across England, and no baptism survives to name her parents. She enters the record already a grown woman, at the altar at Owston Ferry.
Family
Marriage
Children
Our research
Susanna Hewettson — a Ferry woman, but the register is silent
Open research · Owston Ferry, Isle of Axholme
Three things point the same way — that Susanna was born and bred in Owston Ferry parish — and one hard gap keeps it from being proven.
Why Owston Ferry
- She married there. A wedding was, by the custom of the day, most often held in the bride's parish — and while her husband Arthur was set down “of the Ferry,” his children then appear at Epworth, so the Ferry rooting most naturally belongs to her.
- The surname is a parish one. The Hewetsons (Hewetson, Hewitson) were an Owston family — a John Hewetson was raising children at West Butterwick, in Owston Ferry parish, in the 1630s — and the name recurs at neighbouring Epworth.
The wall
Reckoning back from her 1671 marriage, Susanna was born about 1645–1650 — squarely inside the Commonwealth gap, when parish registration collapsed across England (roughly 1642–1660). No baptism for her survives, so her parents cannot yet be named. A possible family is John & Alice Hewetson of West Butterwick, christening children in the parish in the 1630s — and a naming lead points their way: Susanna's second son was called John, the name a second son took, by custom, from his mother's father. It is a lean, not a proof; without her own baptism, no line can yet be drawn to them. A surviving will, or a marriage settlement naming her parish and people, would be what settles it.