Benjamin Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Benjamin Foster (1776–1840), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Revolutionary-era Massachusetts, parentage in the Foster–Parlin household, his marriage to Lydia Jane Long, his son James B. Foster, his death in Tioga County, New York, and the westward migration era he lived through.

Benjamin Foster was born on the 14th of August, 1776, in the town of Oakham, Worcester County, Massachusetts — entering the world scarcely a month after the Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed in Philadelphia. The Massachusetts of his infancy was a land newly committed to revolution, its towns and farming villages furnishing soldiers, provisions, and stern Congregational conviction to the cause of American independence. Oakham itself, settled only a generation earlier in the hill country west of Worcester, was a community of modest farmsteads and meetinghouse piety, and it was into this setting that Benjamin was received as the son of Ebenezer Foster (1732–1811) and Hannah Parlin (1740–1808).

In the fullness of time Benjamin took to wife Lydia Jane Long, and from their union came at least one recorded son, James B. Foster, born in 1813 and living until 1880. The decades of Benjamin's adult life were ones of restless westward and northward movement among the families of central Massachusetts, as the opening of new lands in upstate New York drew countless households out of the worn soils of New England in search of fresh acreage. Benjamin, in the manner of so many of his generation, followed that current westward into the Southern Tier of New York, settling — or at the least ending his days — in Tioga County.

His death is recorded as having occurred before 1840, at which time he would have been in his early sixties. The precise day and place of burial have not been preserved in the records consulted by the compiler. He departed in the years when Andrew Jackson's America was giving way to the more turbulent decade that would follow, leaving behind his widow Lydia and the line that would carry his blood forward.

Benjamin Foster stood as a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.