Christian McFarland

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Christian McFarland (1740–1776), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, her marriage to John Long, the birth of her daughter Lydia Jane Long, and her death at age thirty-six in 1776, set against the backdrop of the American Revolution.

Christian McFarland (1740–1776) was born in Rutland, Worcester County, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, during the closing years of King George II's reign. Although bearing a name more often given to men in that era, she was recorded as female in the family register; such usage of "Christian" as a feminine given name was not uncommon in colonial New England, where Scots and Scots-Irish naming customs persisted among settlers of the central Massachusetts hill towns. Rutland and its neighboring townships had been carved out of the central Massachusetts wilderness only a generation before her birth, and in her youth the region remained a frontier of modest farmsteads, meetinghouses, and town commons.

Christian married John Long, with whom she made her home in Oakham, a small township adjoining Rutland that had been set off as a district in 1762 and incorporated as a town during the Revolutionary period. Their union produced a daughter recorded in the family line, Lydia Jane Long, born in 1776. Lydia would in time carry the family forward, living until 1830.

Christian's life closed in 1776 in Oakham, the same year of her daughter's birth and of the colonies' Declaration of Independence. She was but thirty-six years of age at her death. Maternal mortality in the late colonial period remained a sober and ever-present hazard, and the proximity of her daughter's birth to her own passing accords with patterns commonly attested in the period's vital records, though the precise circumstances are not preserved in the archive. She did not live to see the outcome of the war then unfolding across Massachusetts and the wider seaboard, nor the long life of the daughter who survived her.

Christian McFarland was a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.