Katherine Bent

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Katherine Bent (1736–1818), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, her parentage by Peter Bent and Mary Parris, her marriage to William Russell, her daughter Mary Parris Russell, and her later removal to Vermont. Notable: descends through her mother from the Parris family of colonial Massachusetts.

Katherine Bent was born on the 23rd of September, 1736, in Sudbury, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, the daughter of Peter Bent (1703–1798) and Mary Parris (1703–1803). Her birth fell within the long generation of New England families whose roots reached back to the earliest Puritan settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Sudbury in that era remained a settled agricultural town of meetinghouse-centered village life, ordered by congregational worship and the seasonal rhythms of inland husbandry.

Through her mother, Mary Parris, Katherine carried into her line a surname long associated with colonial Massachusetts — a connection that places the family within the broader Parris kindred whose name is indelibly recorded in the history of seventeenth-century New England. Her parents were both long-lived, each reaching the threshold of a century, and Katherine herself would inherit something of that durability, surviving into her eighty-second year.

Katherine was joined in marriage to William Russell, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Mary Parris Russell, born in 1763 and carrying her maternal grandmother's surname forward as a middle name — a common New England practice of the period by which matrilineal lines were quietly preserved in the naming of children. Mary Parris Russell would live until 1835, transmitting the Bent and Parris descent into the next generation.

In her later years Katherine removed from her native Massachusetts to the hill country of Vermont, a migration shared by many New England families in the decades following the Revolution, as the opening of the Green Mountain lands drew settlers northward into Rutland County and its neighboring towns. There, in Shrewsbury, she died on the 18th of January, 1818, having lived through the entire arc of the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods of American history.

Katherine Bent stands as a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.