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 parentage, marriage to Hannah Parlin, his son Benjamin, his death in New Braintree, and era context. Notable: born in Salem four decades after the witch trials; lived through the American Revolution and early Republic.

Ebenezer Foster, born on the 25th of May in the year 1732 at Salem, in Essex County, Massachusetts, was the son of Ebenezer Foster (1710–1769) and Lydia Felton (1712–1792). His arrival in Salem placed him in one of the oldest English settlements of the New World, a coastal town whose name had, only forty years prior, been seared into the colonial conscience by the witchcraft trials of 1692. By the time of Ebenezer's boyhood, however, Salem had recovered its standing as a thriving port of merchants, fishermen, and shipbuilders, and the young Foster grew to manhood amid the bustle of mid-eighteenth-century maritime New England.

In the fullness of years he took to wife Hannah Parlin, a union which carried the Foster line forward into the next generation. Among their children was Benjamin Foster, born in 1776 — a year that requires no introduction in the annals of American history — and who lived until 1840, continuing the lineage from which the compiler is descended.

Ebenezer's life spanned a remarkable era. Born under the reign of King George II, he came of age during the French and Indian War, witnessed the upheaval of the American Revolution, and lived long enough to see the young Republic establish itself under the Constitution. The Massachusetts of his later years was no longer a colony of the Crown but a Commonwealth, and the inland farming towns of Worcester County drew many a family westward from the older coastal settlements.

It was in such a town — New Braintree, in Worcester County — that Ebenezer Foster closed his earthly account on the 19th of March, 1811, at the venerable age of seventy-eight. He rests in the soil of the Commonwealth that had cradled four generations of his forebears.

Ebenezer was the compiler's sixth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.