Eunice Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eunice Libby (1791–1866), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Down East Maine, her parentage in the Libby and Weston families, her marriage to William Kilton, her daughter Lovisa, and the early-republic coastal Maine context of her long life.

Eunice Libby was born on the 25th of June, 1791, in Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine, and departed this life on the 12th of September, 1866, in the neighboring town of Harrington, having passed the whole of her seventy-five years within the bounds of a single county along the rugged Down East coast. She was the daughter of Reuben Libby (1745–1833) and Rebecca Weston (1745–1819), and stood in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 5× great-grandmother.

The Libby surname was, by the time of Eunice's birth, a well-established one along the Maine coast, the family having been seated in that region from the colonial era. Washington County in 1791 was a remote and thinly settled frontier of the new Republic, its livelihood drawn from the sea, from lumber, and from the small farms wrested out of the spruce forests. Jonesboro, where Eunice was born, and Harrington, where she died, were both modest coastal townships whose families intermarried freely; the steady traffic of coasting schooners bound for Boston gave such communities their tenuous link to the wider Atlantic world.

Eunice was joined in marriage to William Kilton, uniting two of the old coastal lines of the region. Of this union, the records of the archive preserve one daughter, Lovisa M. Kilton, born in 1812 and living to a notable age, dying in 1897. Through Lovisa, the Libby and Kilton blood was carried forward into the generations that would eventually flow into the compiler's own paternal grandmother's lineage.

Eunice's long life spanned a remarkable arc of the nation's early history: born only two years after the inauguration of President Washington, she lived through the War of 1812, which would have been keenly felt along the Maine coast, the admission of Maine itself to statehood in 1820, and the whole of the Civil War, dying in the year following its close. She rests in Washington County, Maine, where she had lived all her days. Eunice was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.