Samuel KNOWLES

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Knowles (1733–1797), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Provincetown, Massachusetts, his death in Addison, Maine, his mother Elizabeth Bacon, his wife Sarah Elwell, and his daughter Elizabeth. Notable: representative of the early Cape Cod–to-Maine coastal migration in 18th-century New England.

Samuel Knowles, born in 1733 at Provincetown in Barnstable County on the outermost reach of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, lived a life that traced the long northeastward migration of New England families along the Atlantic seaboard during the eighteenth century. He was the son of Elizabeth Bacon (1692–1737), and was but four years of age at the time of his mother's passing — a circumstance not uncommon in an era when childbed mortality and epidemic illness frequently broke households early.

Provincetown in the 1730s was a small fishing settlement clinging to the sandy hook of Cape Cod, its livelihood drawn almost entirely from the sea. The families of that place were intimately bound to cod, whaling, and coastal trade, and many young men of Samuel's generation followed these maritime pursuits northward toward the rich fishing grounds and untaken timberlands of the District of Maine, then still a frontier portion of Massachusetts.

Samuel was joined in marriage to Sarah Elwell, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Elizabeth Knowles, born in 1758 and living until 1810. Through Elizabeth the line would carry forward into the generations from which the compiler descends.

Samuel's later years were spent in Addison, Washington County, Maine — a coastal town along the rugged Down East shore, settled in the latter half of the eighteenth century by families largely drawn from Cape Cod and the older Massachusetts settlements. There he died on the twenty-seventh of November, 1797, having lived sixty-four years and having witnessed in his lifetime the colonial expansion of New England, the upheavals of the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the founding of the United States.

Samuel Knowles stood as a seventh great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother line, his life forming one of the earliest documented links in that branch of the Hyten family's New England ancestry.