William Russell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Russell (1737–1828), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Massachusetts, parentage, marriage to Katherine Bent, his daughter Mary Parris Russell, and era context spanning the late colonial period, the American Revolution, and the early Republic. Notable: a long life of ninety-one years rooted entirely in Middlesex and Worcester counties.

William Russell (1737–1828) was born on the 22nd of August, 1737, in Sudbury, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel Russel (1712–1793) and Sarah Bryant (1722–1785). His lifespan of ninety-one years was a remarkable one by the measure of his age, carrying him from the late colonial period of British New England, through the convulsions of the American Revolution, and into the early decades of the American Republic he would have known as an old man.

The Massachusetts of William's youth was a settled but still frontier-conscious province, its inland Middlesex towns such as Sudbury organized around the meetinghouse, the militia trainings, and the agricultural cycle of stony New England farmland. The families of these towns were closely intermarried, and the Russell name was a familiar one in the region throughout the eighteenth century.

William was united in marriage to Katherine Bent. Of their household the family record preserves a daughter, Mary Parris Russell, born in 1763 and living until 1835. The middle name Parris carried by his daughter suggests a connection of consequence to that surname — a name long associated, in New England memory, with the Salem of an earlier generation — though the precise channel by which it entered the family is for other entries of this register to trace.

In the latter portion of his life William removed, or perhaps was carried by the gradual westward drift of his kin, from Middlesex County into the neighboring county of Worcester. It was at Shrewsbury, in that county, that he died on the 5th of November, 1828, having outlived his wife's generation and seen the birth of the nation in which his descendants would scatter and multiply.

William Russell was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.