52 Ancestors 52 Weeks 2026 Week 3 - What This Story Means to Me

A Family Story: The Collingbornes of Horsham, 1604

In the spring of 1604, life in the quiet market town of Horsham carried on much as it always had. Families tended their gardens, traded in the weekly market, and prepared for the warmer months ahead. But beneath the surface, something deadly was moving through Sussex—something no one could see, and no one could stop.

For the Collingborne family, those two weeks in May would change everything.

Agnes Collingborne, born Agnes Jackson, was the first in Horsham to fall victim to the plague that year. On 9 May 1604, she was laid to rest. At the time, no one could have imagined how quickly the tragedy would unfold. Within days, the disease swept through the household with terrifying speed.

Her son John was buried on 19 May.

Her husband William, and another son, George, followed on 21 May.

A younger son, also named William, was buried on 25 May.

Five members of one family, gone in just over a fortnight.

It’s the kind of devastation we usually read about in history books—numbers, dates, statistics. But when those names belong to your own family, the past suddenly feels closer. These weren’t just victims of an epidemic; they were parents, children, siblings. They lived in the same Sussex landscape known today. They walked the same lanes. They hoped for the same things.

After the plague swept through the Collingborne home, only three children remained:

•             Mary, born 1581

•             Thomas, born 1587

•             Anne, born 1595

Mary and Thomas disappear from the records after 1604. Some family trees list them as victims of the same outbreak, but no evidence has been found to confirm this. Their silence in the records leaves us with a mystery—one of many that time has swallowed.

But Anne survived. Just nine years old when she lost her parents and brothers, she somehow endured. Sixteen years later, in August 1620, she married Matthew Bennett. Together they raised eight children, including Thomas Bennett, born in 1631—my 8× great‑grandfather. Through Anne, the Collingborne line lived on.

The plague that struck Horsham was part of the wider 1603–1604 epidemic that swept across England, from London to the rural south. Caused by Yersinia pestis and carried by fleas on rodents, it returned again and again throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, reshaping families and communities with each wave.

For me, this story is more than a historical footnote. It’s a reminder of the fragility of life in those times, and of the resilience that allowed my family to continue. Anne’s survival—and the generations that followed—stand as a quiet testament to endurance in the face of overwhelming loss.

Four centuries later, I can remember them not as distant names in a parish register, but as part of my own family story.