Henry F Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Henry F Allen (1871–1954), a 2× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in coastal Maine, his parents Henry Franklin Foster and Emma F Allen, his marriage to Martha Ann 'Annie' White, his daughter Iva Belle 'Ruth' Allen, and the New England era context of his upbringing.

Henry F Allen (1871–1954) was born on the fifth day of April, 1871, in Centerville, Washington County, Maine — a small settlement on the rugged easternmost coast of the United States, a region long shaped by the rhythms of the Atlantic, the timber stands of the Maine interior, and the modest livelihoods drawn from sea and forest alike. Washington County in the years following the Civil War remained a landscape of small townships, Congregational meetinghouses, and tight kinship networks, and it was into this New England world that Henry entered life.

He was the son of Henry Franklin Foster (1851–1926) and Emma F Allen (1854–1930), and bore his mother's surname through life — a circumstance not uncommon in rural nineteenth-century New England when matters of legitimacy, custody, or family arrangement led a child to be reared under the maternal line. Whatever the particulars, the Allen name carried forward through him and his descendants.

In the course of his adulthood, Henry was united in marriage to Martha Ann White, known within the family as "Annie." Of this union came at least one recorded daughter, Iva Belle Allen (1903–1990), who went by the familiar name "Ruth" and who would carry the family forward into the twentieth century.

Henry's life spanned an extraordinary stretch of American history. Born only six years after the close of the Civil War, he came of age during the industrial expansion of the Gilded Age, lived through the First World War, the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, and survived into the early years of the postwar era. He died in October of 1954, in the United States, at the age of eighty-three.

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