Mary L Caler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary L Caler (1851–1900), a 3× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in coastal Washington County, Maine, her parentage by William Henry Caler and Lovisa M. Kilton, her marriage to John Willard White, and her daughter Martha Ann 'Annie' White. Notable: lifelong residence in Centerville, Maine.

Mary L Caler (1851–1900) was born on the twenty-seventh day of March, 1851, in Centerville, Washington County, Maine, the daughter of William Henry Caler (1805–1883) and Lovisa M. Kilton (1812–1897). She entered the world in the easternmost reaches of New England, where the rocky coast of Down East Maine met the great forests that supplied the lumber and shipbuilding trades then sustaining the region. Washington County in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was a country of small farming and coastal villages, its people drawn from old New England stock, weathered by hard winters and tied closely to the sea and the river drives.

Mary came of age in the years surrounding the American Civil War, a conflict that drew heavily upon the men of Maine. In due course she was joined in marriage to John Willard White, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Martha Ann White, known within the family as Annie, who was born in 1874 and lived until 1941. Through Annie the line of Mary Caler was carried forward into the twentieth century and ultimately into the compiler's own lineage.

Mary remained tied to the place of her birth throughout her life. She died on the twenty-seventh day of June, 1900, in Centerville, within the town of Columbia Falls, Washington County, Maine — the same small community in which she had been born nine and forty years earlier. That her birth and death are recorded in the same village speaks to the rootedness common among the settled families of coastal Maine in that century, where successive generations often lived, married, and were buried within a few miles of one another.

Mary L Caler was the compiler's third great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, standing four generations above the compiler's paternal grandmother in the maternal branch of that line.