Jonathan Kelton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jonathan Kelton (1730–1804), a seven-times great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Dorchester, Massachusetts, his maternal parentage, marriage to Margaret Lucas, his son Benjamin, and his death in Athol. Notable: a long colonial-Massachusetts life spanning the Revolutionary era.

Jonathan Kelton was born on the twenty-seventh day of May in 1730, in Dorchester, then a town of Suffolk County in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He entered the world during the closing decades of British colonial rule, in a community whose Puritan founding had given way, by his generation, to a more diversified New England society of farmers, tradesmen, and seafaring families bound to Boston's growing commerce.

His mother was Mary Bird, born in 1698 and departing this life in 1738, when Jonathan was but eight years of age. The loss of a parent in early childhood was a familiar grief in colonial New England, where epidemics and the rigors of childbirth shaped many a family's story; Jonathan would have come of age under the shadow of that early bereavement.

In the course of his adult life he was joined in marriage to Margaret Lucas, a union that produced a son recorded in the family register as Benjamin Kelton — the surname also rendered as Kilton in some sources — who was born in 1765 and lived until 1852, carrying the line forward into the early republic and beyond.

Jonathan's lifetime traversed momentous chapters of American history. Born a subject of King George II, he lived through the French and Indian War, the gathering storm of colonial protest in Massachusetts, the Revolution that began at Lexington and Concord scarcely a day's ride from his birthplace, and the founding of the United States in which Massachusetts played so central a part. Worcester County, where he would end his days, was during these decades a region of rugged hill farms and steadily growing inland towns.

He died on the twenty-first day of November, 1804, in Athol, Worcester County, Massachusetts, having attained the venerable age of seventy-four years.

Jonathan Kelton stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a seven-times great-grandfather.