Edward Steven Noonan

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Edward Steven Noonan (1879–1964), a great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in maritime Canada, parentage, marriage, sole recorded child, his eventual settling in Massachusetts, and era context regarding New Brunswick-to-New England migration in the late nineteenth century. Notable: cross-border migration from Rexton, New Brunswick to Norfolk County, Massachusetts.

Edward Steven Noonan (1879–1964) was born on the twenty-sixth day of December, 1879, in the village of Rexton, in Kent County on the eastern shore of New Brunswick. He was the son of Edward D. Noonan (1840–1920) and Jane Catherine Woods, known within the family as Genevieve, who had been born about 1851. The Noonan household stood in a quiet coastal parish whose economy in those decades turned upon timber, shipbuilding along the Richibucto River, and the modest agriculture that the maritime climate would permit.

The late nineteenth century saw a great southward migration of Maritimers — many of them young men and women of Irish and Acadian descent — drawn from the Canadian provinces into the mill towns and growing industrial suburbs of New England. The decline of the Atlantic shipbuilding trades and the steady demand for labor in Massachusetts gave shape to this movement, and Edward, like many of his generation, eventually joined that southward current.

He married Iva Belle Allen, who carried the affectionate name Ruth within the family. Of their union one daughter is recorded in the archive: Dorothy Noonan, who continued the line into the next generation and through whom the connection to the compiler descends.

Edward made his later home in Dedham, in Norfolk County, Massachusetts — a town of long colonial standing south of Boston, established in the seventeenth century and, by Edward's lifetime, a settled community of mixed industry and residence. There he passed his final years, dying on the thirty-first day of December, 1964, only days after observing his eighty-fifth birthday. His life thus closed at the very turning of the year, in the same week in which it had begun some eight and a half decades before.

Edward was the compiler's great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.