Lovisa M. Kilton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lovisa M. Kilton (1812–1897), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Washington County, Maine, her parentage in the Kilton and Libby families, her marriage to William Henry Caler, her daughter Mary, and the New England coastal era context of her long life.

Lovisa M. Kilton was born on the first day of December in 1812, in the township of Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine — a coastal community of the Down East region in the closing weeks of the year, and in the very midst of the War of 1812, when the eastern Maine coast lay vulnerable to British naval activity. She was the daughter of William Kilton (1787–1834) and Eunice Libby (1791–1866), a household rooted in the small fishing, lumbering, and farming settlements that characterized Washington County in the early nineteenth century. The Libby surname was an old one in Maine, traceable through generations of New England families who had settled the District of Maine while it remained part of Massachusetts; Maine itself had only achieved statehood in 1820, when Lovisa was a girl of seven.

In the course of her life Lovisa was united in marriage to William Henry Caler. From this union came at least one daughter of record, Mary L. Caler, born in 1851 and living until 1900. The relatively late date of Mary's birth, when Lovisa was approaching the age of forty, is preserved without further commentary in the family record.

The loss of her father in 1834, when Lovisa was a young woman of twenty-two, would have marked an early sorrow; her mother Eunice survived until 1866, affording Lovisa more than five decades of maternal companionship in adulthood. Lovisa herself remained in her native county throughout her long life, passing away on 6 November 1897 in Centerville, Washington, Maine, at the age of eighty-four. Her years spanned the early republic, the antebellum decades, the Civil War, and the industrial transformations of the late nineteenth century.

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