Martha Ann “Annie” White

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Martha Ann "Annie" White (1874–1941), a 2× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Washington County, Maine, her parentage, her marriage to Henry F Allen, her daughter Iva Belle "Ruth" Allen, and the regional context of late nineteenth-century Down East Maine.

Martha Ann White, known within the family by the affectionate diminutive "Annie," was born in June of 1874 in the village of Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine. She was the daughter of John Willard White (1847–1920) and Mary L. Caler (1851–1900), a couple rooted in the rugged coastal stretch of Down East Maine, where the lives of families were shaped by the rhythms of the sea, the lumber trade, and the small tidewater settlements that dotted the bays and rivers of Washington County.

The Maine of Annie's childhood was a place of weather-beaten endurance. The decades following the Civil War had brought a quieter, more contracted prosperity to the eastern reaches of the state, where shipbuilding had begun its long decline and fishing, blueberrying, and timbering carried the burden of local industry. It was within this environment of plain Yankee labor and Congregational tradition that Annie came of age.

In the course of time she became the wife of Henry F. Allen, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Iva Belle Allen (1903–1990), who in family memory was called "Ruth." Through this daughter, the line of Martha Ann White was carried forward into the twentieth century and ultimately into the compiler's own generation.

Annie outlived her mother, Mary, by more than four decades, and her father, John Willard, by some twenty-one years. Her own life closed on the 6th of July, 1941, in Columbia Falls, Washington County, Maine — only a short distance from the village of her birth, suggesting a life largely contained within the familiar coastal landscape of her people. She had reached the age of sixty-seven.

Martha Ann "Annie" White stands in the family record as a 2× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.