Daniel John Stone

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel John Stone (1689–1735), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in coastal Maine, parentage, marriage to Sarah Jenkins, his daughter Mary, and era context for late-17th and early-18th century York and Cumberland counties. Notable: son of a Scandinavian-surnamed immigrant ancestor (Wadelstensteen) anglicized to Stone.

Daniel John Stone was born on the 13th of March, 1689, in the coastal settlement of Kittery, in that portion later set off as Eliot, York County, in the Province of Maine. He was the son of Daniel Wadelstensteen, an immigrant ancestor whose surname — bearing the unmistakable cadence of Scandinavian origin — was in the course of a generation anglicized to the simpler and more serviceable form of Stone, and of Patience Goodwin, herself drawn from a New England line into which the Stone family was thereby joined as a sixth cousin, ten times removed. The household into which Daniel was born thus represented the meeting of an Old World mariner stock with the established settler families of the Maine coast.

The Maine of Daniel's youth was a frontier still raw from the King William's and Queen Anne's wars, its scattered garrison-houses and tidewater farms exposed to the long quarrel between the English crown and the French and their native allies. Kittery and the neighboring plantations along the Piscataqua and the York rivers depended upon fishery, timber, and modest husbandry, and life there was conducted under conditions far less settled than those of the Massachusetts towns to the southward.

In the fullness of time Daniel married Sarah Jenkins. Of this union is recorded a daughter, Mary Stone, born in 1722 and living until 1786, through whom the line is carried forward into the compiler's ancestry.

Daniel John Stone died on the 19th of April, 1735, at Scarborough, in Cumberland County, Maine, at the age of forty-six years. His parents had both preceded him to the grave, his father in 1713 and his mother in 1716, so that he passed the last two decades of his life without their counsel. Daniel was the compiler's eight-times great-grandfather upon the paternal-grandmother line, an early figure standing near the colonial headwaters of that branch.