Nancy E WESCOTT

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nancy E Wescott (1794–1884), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, her parentage, her marriage to Joseph Brookins Johnson, her daughter Susan, her long ninety-year life, and the maritime New England context of her era.

Nancy E Wescott was born in 1794 in Scarborough, Cumberland County, Maine, a coastal town settled in the colonial era along the rocky shoulder of Casco Bay. She was the daughter of Richard Wescott, born in 1761, and Lydia Bryant, born in 1767. Her father died in 1797, when Nancy was but three years of age, leaving her mother Lydia — who would outlive her husband by more than half a century, surviving until 1854 — to shepherd the family through the early years of the young American republic. Maine in that period remained a district of Massachusetts until 1820, and the Wescott household belonged to a generation of coastal New England families whose lives turned on the rhythms of fishing, shipbuilding, and the Atlantic trade.

Nancy in time married Joseph Brookins Johnson. Of the children of that union, the record preserves a daughter, Susan L Johnson, born in 1826, who in later years took the surname White by marriage and lived until 1918, reaching the age of ninety-two. The longevity of mother and daughter alike was striking in an era when many women of the early nineteenth century did not survive childbearing or the recurring epidemics that swept the New England seaboard.

Nancy passed her later years in Machiasport, in Washington County, Maine — a remote shipbuilding and lumbering settlement on the easternmost reach of the United States, hard by the Bay of Fundy. She died there in 1884, having attained the venerable age of ninety years. Her life thus spanned the administrations of every president from Washington to Chester A. Arthur, a remarkable arc encompassing the early republic, the antebellum decades, the Civil War, and the dawn of the industrial age.

Nancy E Wescott was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.