Hannah PARLIN

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hannah Parlin (1740–1808), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Concord, her parentage in the Parlin and Stratton families, her marriage to Ebenezer Foster, her son Benjamin, and the broader Massachusetts context. Notable: lived through the American Revolution in central Massachusetts.

Hannah Parlin (1740–1808) was born on the twenty-fourth day of January 1740 in Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a town whose name would, within her own lifetime, become inseparable from the founding of the American republic. She was the daughter of Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin (1698–1767) and Abigail Stratton (1705–1763), a household of established Middlesex standing, her father's military title reflecting the colonial militia tradition through which provincial Massachusetts organized its defense in the decades preceding the Revolution.

Hannah came of age in a Concord that was still recognizably a Puritan farming community, its meetinghouse and town common at the center of civic life, its families bound by the long-cultivated kinship networks of seventeenth-century New England migration. She was in her mid-thirties when the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired upon Concord's own North Bridge in April of 1775, and she lived the remainder of her years as a citizen of the new United States rather than a subject of the British Crown.

She married Ebenezer Foster, and from that union came a son, Benjamin Foster (1776–1840), whose birth in the very year of American independence places the household firmly within the founding generation of the republic. The move westward from Concord into Worcester County, where Hannah ended her days, followed a familiar pattern of late-eighteenth-century Massachusetts families, as the older eastern towns sent their sons and daughters into the hill country to take up fresh land and form new congregations.

Hannah Parlin died on the twenty-eighth day of February 1808 in Oakham, Worcester County, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty-eight years. She had outlived both her parents by several decades and had seen her son Benjamin grown to a man of more than thirty years. Hannah was the compiler's 6× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.