♀Joan Pyssing

Joan Pyssing (buried 30 October 1629) was a woman of Crewkerne, in Somerset, England, who married Thomas Hull and was the mother of eleven children, two of whom, George and Joseph, settled in New England. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Joseph Hull (1596–1665). Her youngest son, Joseph Hull^W, was the clergyman who led a company of West Country families to Massachusetts in 1635, six years after her death.

Marriage

Joan was a daughter of Richard Pesinge and his wife Margery. Thomas Hull married Joan Pyssing at Crewkerne on 11 January 1572/3. The couple lived at Winsham, in Somerset, where their first two children were baptized in 1574 and 1576, and at Crewkerne.

Children

Eleven children were born to Thomas and Joan between 1574 and 1596. Several died young: Agnes in 1579, Mary in 1584, and a first Joseph in April 1595, a year after his baptism. A year later, on 24 April 1596, another son was baptized at Crewkerne and given the name Joseph again. In the spring of 1597 two more sons, Richard, baptized in 1579, and Robert, baptized in 1584, were buried nine days apart.

Of the sons who grew up, William became a clergyman and was buried at Colyton, in Devon, in 1627, and John died the same year. George married at Crewkerne in 1614 and went to New England, as Joseph did in 1635.

Death

Joan was buried at Crewkerne on 30 October 1629, after more than fifty-six years of marriage and having outlived at least seven of her children. Thomas outlived her by seven years, and was buried at Crewkerne on 29 December 1636.

Notes

Her name

Her name is written Johane or Joan, and her surname Peson, Pesinge or Pyssing. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire calls her Joanna (Peson).

Sources and her ancestry

Her parents, marriage and burial and the children’s baptisms and burials come from a Hull family-society typescript, “The Hull Line”, which follows John Insley Coddington’s article “The Pyssing Ancestry of the Hulls of New England” (in the Evans Festschrift, pages 44 to 51). Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter says that Coddington “provides English records which identify her father, grandfather and many other relatives”, and his Great Migration Begins (page 1042) calls her the mother of George and Joseph Hull.

The date of the marriage

A second Hull family history, citing Holway’s Holway-Rich Heritage, gives the marriage as 1 November 1572, against the typescript’s 11 January 1572/3.