Henry W. Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Henry W. Foster (1815–1892), a 4× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Down East Maine, his parentage, his marriage to Anna K. Ingersoll, his son Henry Franklin Foster, and broader context about 19th-century coastal Washington County, Maine.

Henry W. Foster (1815–1892) was born on the 28th of February, 1815, in the coastal township of Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine, the easternmost reach of the young American republic. He came into the world as the son of Thomas Foster (1783–1874) and Mercy Stevens, who had been born in 1767 and was thus a woman of an older generation when Henry arrived. Washington County in those years was a region of timber, tide, and modest seafaring villages, only recently emerged from the disruptions of the War of 1812, and its inhabitants drew their living from the forests, the fisheries, and the small coasting trade that linked the Down East shore to Boston and the wider Atlantic world.

Henry came of age in this northeastern frontier as Maine itself was settling into statehood, separated from Massachusetts in 1820 when he was a boy of five. In due course he married Anna K. Ingersoll, whose surname was a familiar one along the Maine coast. From their union came at least one son recorded in the family register, Henry Franklin Foster (1851–1926), who would carry the line forward into the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Henry W. Foster lived a long life of seventy-seven years, spanning a remarkable stretch of American history from the close of the Madison administration through the Civil War and into the industrial age of the Gilded Era. He passed his final years in Centerville, in the same Washington County of his birth, and there he died on the 30th of May, 1892, having scarcely strayed from the rivers and bays of eastern Maine that had shaped his family for generations.

Henry was the compiler's 4× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.