James B Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James B Foster (1813–1880), a 4× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Vermont birth, New England parentage, marriage to Abigail Woodis, and the single recorded daughter Isabella who carried the line forward. Notable: New England Yankee heritage, born in the early Republic, lived through the antebellum decades and the Civil War era.

James B Foster was born in 1813 in the green hill country of Vermont, a state then but two decades into its full participation in the young American Republic. He was the son of Benjamin Foster (1776–1840) and Lydia Jane Long (1776–1830), a couple whose own lives spanned the Revolutionary generation and the founding decades of the nation. Coming into the world in the wake of the War of 1812, James belonged to the first cohort of Americans born wholly under the constitutional order, and he was reared in the agrarian, town-meeting culture for which Vermont had already become known.

The Vermont of James's youth was a landscape of stony hill farms, sheep pastures, white-steepled meetinghouses, and small mill villages strung along swift rivers. It was a region marked by Yankee independence of mind, strong Congregationalist and dissenting religious traditions, and, in the decades that followed, by considerable emigration as her sons and daughters sought broader acres in New York, Ohio, and the western territories.

In due course James married Abigail Woodis, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Isabella A Foster (1839–1918), through whom the line descended into later generations of the family. Isabella's long life, stretching from the eve of the Mexican War nearly to the close of the Great War, would carry the Foster inheritance forward into a transformed American century.

James himself lived through the great upheavals of the antebellum decades, the secession crisis, the Civil War, and the early years of Reconstruction, dying in 1880 at approximately sixty-seven years of age. Though the particulars of his occupation and residence in his later years are not preserved in the present record, his place in the family's pedigree is firm and clear.

James B Foster was the compiler's 4× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.