Benjamin Kelton\Kilton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Benjamin Kelton (also rendered Kilton) (1765–1852), a sixth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in central Massachusetts, parentage, marriage to Mary Parris Russell, his son William, his removal to coastal Maine, and the New England era context of his lifetime. Notable: lived through the American Revolution and the early Republic.

Benjamin Kelton, whose surname appears in the records under the variant spellings Kelton and Kilton, was born on the third of December, 1765, in the town of Athol, Worcester County, Massachusetts. He was the son of Jonathan Kelton (1730–1804) and Margaret Lucas (1734–1817), a New England household of the colonial generation that would shortly see its world transformed by revolution. Benjamin entered the world only a decade before the first muster at Lexington and Concord, and his earliest years unfolded amid the political ferment that produced the American republic. Worcester County in that era was a settled but still-expanding interior region of Massachusetts, its towns built around meetinghouses, mill streams, and the careful cultivation of stony upland farms.

In the course of his life Benjamin took to wife Mary Parris Russell, with whom the family register records at least one son, William Kilton, born in 1787 and dying in 1834. The variation between the Kelton and Kilton spellings within a single generation — father and son recorded under differing forms — reflects the fluid orthography common in New England town and church records of the late eighteenth century, before standardized civil registration fixed surnames in their modern shape.

At some point Benjamin removed northeastward from the hills of inland Massachusetts to the rugged coast of Down East Maine, for he died on the third of May, 1852, in Jonesboro, Washington County, Maine, having attained the considerable age of eighty-six years. Washington County in that period was a thinly settled frontier of fishing harbors, lumbering camps, and small farming communities pressed between the forest and the Atlantic. His long life spanned the entire arc from the colonial era through the Revolution, the War of 1812, and into the years immediately preceding the Civil War.

Benjamin Kelton was a sixth-great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.