Esther Hanscom

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Esther Hanscom (1692–1761), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Kittery, Maine; her mother Alice Rogers; her marriage to David Libby; her son Major Josiah Libby; and the early-Maine frontier era. Notable: born in coastal Maine during the period of King William's War and the Salem witch trials.

Esther Hanscom was born on the 20th of November, 1692, in the seacoast settlement of Kittery, in York County, in the District of Maine, then under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She entered the world during one of the most turbulent seasons in New England's early history: the autumn of 1692 fell at the close of the Salem witch trials in nearby Essex County, and the frontier of coastal Maine was still reeling from the raids and uncertainties of King William's War, which had brought devastation to several Piscataqua-region towns only a few years earlier. Into this fragile colonial world Esther was born to her mother, Alice Rogers, who herself was a young woman of but twenty-one years at the time of Esther's birth.

Esther's mother did not long survive her daughter's infancy. Alice Rogers died in 1696, when Esther was scarcely four years of age, leaving the child to be reared amid the close-knit kin networks that characterized the early Maine settlements, where extended families and neighbors customarily took in the motherless children of the community.

In the course of time Esther was united in marriage to David Libby, joining one of the prominent and prolific families of the Scarborough and Saco region. Of this union there is recorded a son, Josiah Libby, born in 1716, who would in later years attain the military rank of Major and live to the year 1786, a span that carried him through both the colonial wars and the American Revolution.

Esther Hanscom passed from this life in March of 1761, in Scarborough, in Cumberland County, Maine, having lived to the considerable age of sixty-eight years and having witnessed the transformation of her native province from a vulnerable frontier into a settled and increasingly prosperous part of New England.

Esther was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.