Anna K INGERSOLL

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna K Ingersoll (1818–1910), a 4× great-grandparent 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 W. Foster, her son Henry Franklin Foster, and historical context regarding nineteenth-century life in Down East Maine.

Anna K Ingersoll (1818–1910) was born on September 17, 1818, in the coastal township of Columbia, Washington County, Maine, the daughter of Samuel Nash Ingersoll (1784–1872). Her birth came in the early decades of Maine's separate statehood—Maine having been carved from Massachusetts only in 1820—and her childhood unfolded in the rugged Down East country, a region whose economy in that era turned upon shipbuilding, lumbering, fishing, and the small mixed farms that clung to the rocky coastline of Washington County. The Ingersoll name was long established in northern New England by the time of her birth, and Anna entered a community in which kinship networks and Congregational meetinghouses shaped the rhythms of daily life.

Anna married Henry W. Foster, and from this union issued at least one son, Henry Franklin Foster (1851–1926), who carried forward both his father's given name and the family's New England roots. The middle decades of the nineteenth century, during which Anna raised her family, were a period of considerable change in Maine: the Civil War drew sons from coastal towns into the Union ranks, the timber and shipping trades reached their height before yielding to industrial competition, and successive waves of Mainers migrated westward in search of new land. Anna herself, however, remained rooted in her native state.

She lived to the remarkable age of ninety-one, dying in Maine on August 8, 1910. Her lifespan stretched from the presidency of James Monroe nearly to the eve of the First World War — a span encompassing the rise and fall of the age of sail, the abolition of slavery, the coming of the railroad, and the dawning of the automobile and the electric age. Few of her generation witnessed so wide a sweep of American history.

Anna K Ingersoll was a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.