Lydia Jane Long

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lydia Jane Long (1776–1830), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Revolutionary-era Massachusetts, parentage, the loss of her mother in infancy, her marriage to Benjamin Foster, her son James B Foster, and her later removal to Ohio. Notable: born the same year as American independence; westward migration to the Ohio frontier.

Lydia Jane Long was born on the fourteenth of August, 1776, in Oakham, Worcester County, Massachusetts — a New England town then scarcely a month removed from the Declaration of Independence. The Massachusetts of her infancy was a country in arms, its hill towns mustering militia and its households absorbing the daily costs of revolution. Into this turbulent moment Lydia entered as the daughter of John Long (1740–1830) and Christian McFarland (1740–1776). Her mother did not survive the year of Lydia's birth, and the child was thus raised in the household of her father, whose own long life would extend until 1830 — the very year in which his daughter's record likewise closes.

Lydia in time became the wife of Benjamin Foster, and from this union descended at least one son recorded in the family papers, James B Foster, born in 1813 and living until 1880. Through James the line carried forward into the generations whose names are gathered in the present register.

The later years of Lydia's life saw her removed from the granite hills of Massachusetts to the newer country of Ohio, where she died sometime after 1830. The migration was characteristic of her generation: in the first decades of the nineteenth century, New England families streamed westward along the post roads and waterways, drawn by the promise of arable land in the Ohio Valley and the opening of the Northwest Territory. Many a Massachusetts-born child of the Revolution thus ended her days on what had, at her birth, been frontier wilderness. The precise date and burying place of Lydia Jane Long are not preserved in the family's surviving papers; what endures is the line she carried from Revolutionary Massachusetts into the Ohio country.

Lydia Jane Long was a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.