Elizabeth Knowles

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Knowles (1758–1810), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, parentage in the Knowles and Elwell families, marriage to William Ingersoll, her son Samuel Nash Ingersoll, and the historical context of late-colonial and early-republic Maine. Notable: lifespan spans the American Revolution and Maine's settlement era.

Elizabeth Knowles (1758–1810) was born in Cape Elizabeth, in Cumberland County on the rocky Atlantic seaboard of what was then the District of Maine within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was the daughter of Samuel Knowles (1733–1797) and Sarah Elwell (1730–1795), a household rooted in the fishing, farming, and coasting communities that defined Cumberland County in the middle eighteenth century. The Knowles and Elwell surnames were long established along the New England coast, and Elizabeth was born into a generation that would come of age amid the upheavals of the American Revolution.

The Maine of her childhood was a frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sparsely settled, oriented toward the sea, and bound to the larger Atlantic economy through cod, lumber, and shipbuilding. The Revolutionary War, which broke out when Elizabeth was a girl of seventeen, brought hardship to the Maine coast, most dramatically in the burning of nearby Falmouth by the Royal Navy in 1775. Communities such as Cape Elizabeth lived through the war within sight of British naval activity, and the postwar years brought a renewed surge of settlement eastward along the coast.

Elizabeth married William Ingersoll, recorded in family tradition with the honorific "Governor." To this union was born Samuel Nash Ingersoll (1784–1872), who would carry the line forward into the long nineteenth century and live to witness the Civil War and beyond.

Elizabeth died in 1810 in Sedgwick, Hancock County, Maine, a coastal town on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay. Her removal from Cape Elizabeth in Cumberland County to Sedgwick in Hancock County mirrored the broader eastward migration of Maine families in the decades following independence, as new towns were chartered along the bays and inlets Down East. She had outlived both her parents by roughly fifteen years and died at the age of fifty-two.

Elizabeth Knowles was the compiler's 6× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.