Henry Franklin Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Henry Franklin Foster (1851–1926), a 3× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Washington County, Maine, his parentage, marriage to Emma F. Allen, his son Henry F. Allen, and era context for coastal Maine in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Henry Franklin Foster (1851–1926) was born on the eleventh of February, 1851, in Centerville, Washington County, Maine, the son of Henry W. Foster (1815–1892) and Anna K. Ingersoll (1818–1910). He spent the whole of his life within the bounds of his native state, departing this world on the twenty-third of February, 1926, in Maine, only days after his seventy-fifth birthday.

Washington County in the mid-nineteenth century was a region shaped by the rhythms of the Down East coast — its livelihoods drawn from timber, shipbuilding, fishing, and the small inland farms that supplied the lumber camps. Centerville, a modest township in the interior of the county, lay among the river drainages that fed the busy ports of Machias and Jonesport. Children born there in 1851, as Henry was, came of age during the years of the Civil War and the great industrial reorganization that followed, when Maine's seafaring economy gave gradual way to manufacturing and to westward emigration.

Henry married Emma F. Allen, and from their union came a son, Henry F. Allen (1871–1954), whose surname reflects his mother's line. The boy carried his father's given name forward into the twentieth century, living until 1954 and thereby bridging four generations of the family's American story.

Henry's parents both achieved notable longevity for their generation — his father reaching seventy-seven and his mother ninety-two — a circumstance suggesting a settled household and the steady constitution often found among the old New England farming families of the Maine coast. Henry himself lived to see the close of the Victorian age, the First World War, and the first quarter of the modern century before his death in 1926.

Henry was the compiler's third great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, standing five generations removed from the present record-keeper of the family archive.