Sarah Jenkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Jenkins (1689–1741), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Kittery, Maine, her parentage by Jabez Jenkins and Hannah Curtis, her marriage to Daniel John Stone, her daughter Mary Stone, and the frontier New England context of her lifetime.

Sarah Jenkins (1689–1741) was born in Kittery, in York County on the southern coast of the District of Maine, then a frontier province under Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction. She was the daughter of Jabez H. Jenkins (1655–1697) and Hannah Anna Curtis (1665–1737), and entered the world at a moment of profound unease along the northern New England coast: King William's War had begun the same year, and the small fishing and farming settlements between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec lived under recurring threat of raids. Sarah was only eight years old when her father died in 1697, leaving her mother Hannah a widow who would survive her husband by four decades.

In time, Sarah married Daniel John Stone, joining the Jenkins line to the Stone family of coastal Maine. Of their union, the record preserves a daughter, Mary Stone, born in 1722 and living until 1786. Mary's long life would carry the family's story forward into the latter half of the eighteenth century, well past the colonial period of her mother's experience.

Sarah passed her later years in Scarborough, in Cumberland County, a township on Casco Bay that had been twice destroyed and resettled during the Indian wars of the late seventeenth century and was, by Sarah's adult lifetime, again becoming a stable community of fishermen, farmers, and small traders. She died there on the 8th of November, 1741, at the age of fifty-two. Her lifespan thus bridged the close of the seventeenth-century frontier wars and the eve of the great mid-century conflicts that would reshape New England once more.

Sarah Jenkins stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an eighth great-grandmother, an early colonial Maine forebear whose daughter Mary Stone carried the lineage onward.