EBENEZER Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ebenezer Foster (1732–1811), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Salem, Massachusetts, his death in New Braintree, his son Benjamin, and the colonial New England era spanning the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the early Republic. Notable: Salem, Essex County birthplace with its colonial Puritan heritage.

Ebenezer Foster (1732–1811) stands among the earliest generations preserved in this register, taking his place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a sixth great-grandparent. He was born on the twenty-fifth of May, 1732, in Salem, in Essex County, Massachusetts — a town whose name had, four decades before his birth, become inseparable from the witchcraft trials of 1692. By the time of Ebenezer's childhood, that dark episode had passed into uneasy memory, and Salem had resumed its character as a busy New England seaport and a hub of the colonial coasting trade, its streets bearing the imprint of Puritan settlement and maritime commerce alike.

Ebenezer's life unfolded across one of the most consequential stretches of American history. He came of age during the long contest between Britain and France for dominion over the North American continent, lived through the upheaval of the Revolution and the founding of the United States, and witnessed in his later years the early decades of the new Republic under its first presidents. The Massachusetts of his maturity was a colony, and then a commonwealth, in which town meeting, congregational worship, and the agrarian rhythms of the New England countryside shaped daily life.

At some point Ebenezer removed inland from the coastal precincts of Salem to the rural township of New Braintree, in Worcester County. There, in that quiet farming community of central Massachusetts, he passed his final years and died on the nineteenth of March, 1811, having attained the venerable age of seventy-eight.

From Ebenezer descended his son Benjamin Foster (1776–1840), born in the very year of American independence, through whom the Foster line is carried forward in this register. Ebenezer was the compiler's sixth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.