Sarah Elwell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Elwell (1730–1795), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, her early loss of both parents, her marriage to Samuel Knowles, her daughter Elizabeth, and her later life in the Maine frontier district. Era context: colonial New England, pre-Revolutionary coastal settlement, and the post-war Maine townships.

Sarah Elwell was born in July of 1730 in Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts, a weather-beaten fishing port on Cape Ann whose families had long drawn their living from the sea. She was the daughter of David Elwell (1703–1732) and Sarah Mariner (1708–1738), and bore her mother's given name, as was the prevailing custom of the period.

Sarah's early years were marked by sorrow. Her father David died in 1732, when she was scarcely two years of age, and her mother Sarah Mariner followed to the grave in 1738, leaving Sarah an orphan before her eighth birthday. In colonial Essex County, such children were ordinarily placed under the guardianship of extended kin or neighboring households, raised within the close-knit Congregational community that defined Gloucester life in that era.

In the course of time, Sarah married Samuel Knowles, joining her fortunes to a household that would eventually look northward, as so many New England families did in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, toward the opening lands of the District of Maine. Of her children, the family record preserves the name of Elizabeth Knowles, born in 1758 and living until 1810, through whom Sarah's line descends to the compiler.

Sarah lived through a remarkable sweep of history: the colonial wars with France, the upheaval of the American Revolution, and the early years of the new Republic. She passed her final years in Gorham, in Cumberland County, Maine, then a frontier township of modest farms and meetinghouses settled largely by families of Massachusetts stock. She died there on the 19th of April, 1795, at the age of sixty-four.

Sarah Elwell was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.