William Kilton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Kilton (1787–1834), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in coastal Down East Maine, parentage, marriage to Eunice Libby, and known issue. Notable: descended through his mother Mary Parris Russell from the Parris line of colonial New England.

William Kilton (1787–1834) was born in the year 1787 in Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine, and died in that same town on the twelfth day of March, 1834, having reached the age of forty-six years. His life was thus bounded, beginning and ending, by the rocky tidewater coast of Down East Maine, in a county whose settlements were still young in his boyhood and whose fortunes turned upon fishing, lumbering, and the coasting trade.

He was a son of Benjamin Kelton (also rendered Kilton) (1765–1852) and Mary Parris Russell (1763–1835). Through his mother he descended from the Parris line of colonial New England, a name long established in the region, while his father's surname, variously spelled in the records of the time, was carried by several families along the Maine and New Hampshire coast. Washington County itself had been formally organized only in 1789, two years after William's birth, and Jonesboro, incorporated in 1809, remained throughout his lifetime a small community of farmers and seafaring households on the eastern frontier of the new republic.

William married Eunice Libby, whose surname was a familiar one in the towns of southern and midcoast Maine. Of their union there is recorded a daughter, Lovisa M. Kilton (1812–1897), who long survived both her parents and through whom the line of descent was carried forward.

William's adult years spanned the War of 1812 — a conflict felt acutely along the Maine coast, where British vessels disturbed the eastern ports — the separation of Maine from Massachusetts in 1820, and the early years of statehood. He did not live to see his daughter into middle age, dying in 1834, the year before his mother's own death. William was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.