Margaret Lucas

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Lucas (1734–1817), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Worcester County, Massachusetts, her marriage to Jonathan Kelton, her son Benjamin Kelton, and colonial-era New England context spanning the Revolutionary period.

Margaret Lucas (1734–1817) was born on the 23rd of April, 1734, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and passed from this life on the 14th of December, 1817, in Athol, in the same county, having reached the venerable age of eighty-three years. Her life thus spanned more than eight decades of consequential transformation in New England — from the late colonial period under the British Crown, through the upheaval of the American Revolution, the founding of the Republic, and into the early years of the young nation's westward expansion.

Worcester County, where Margaret was both born and laid to rest, was at the time of her birth a region of established Puritan settlement, its towns organized around the Congregational meetinghouse and the agrarian rhythms of New England farm life. Athol, the place of her death, had been incorporated in 1762, and the surrounding hill country of central Massachusetts remained throughout her lifetime a landscape of modest farms, sawmills, and close-knit communities bound by ties of kinship and faith.

Margaret was united in marriage to Jonathan Kelton, and of this union is recorded a son, Benjamin Kelton — whose surname appears variously in the records as Kelton and Kilton — born in 1765 and surviving until 1852. Benjamin's long life, like his mother's, carried the family across momentous generational thresholds.

Though the particulars of Margaret's daily life, her domestic labors, and her temperament are not preserved in the documentary record available to this archive, the bare facts of her long residence in Worcester County, her steadfast union, and her continuation of the family line through her son Benjamin bear quiet but eloquent witness to the perseverance that marked the women of her generation.

Margaret Lucas was a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.