Daniel (Immigrant) Wadelstensteen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel (Immigrant) Wadelstensteen (1643–1713), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth, immigrant status, life in colonial Maine, marriage to Patience Goodwin, and his son Daniel John Stone. Notable: 17th-century Dutch-to-New England migration and an early surname that would later anglicize to Stone within the family line.

Daniel Wadelstensteen, known in family tradition as 'the Immigrant,' was born on the 31st of August, 1643. The record of his birthplace is uncertain, with the family register preserving two possibilities: either the Netherlands of his probable ancestral origin, or the early frontier settlement of South Berwick in Kittery, York County, in the Province of Maine. The ambiguity itself testifies to the disruptions of seventeenth-century transatlantic life, when Dutch families crossed to the New World during a period of intense maritime trade and religious mobility, and when colonial vital records were kept unevenly, if at all. The very form of his surname — Wadelstensteen — bears the unmistakable cadence of the Low Countries, and within a generation it would be softened by English neighbors and clerks into the more familiar 'Stone.'

He settled, or remained, in Kittery, on the rocky and contested coast of what was then part of the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction. The Kittery of his adulthood was a community of shipwrights, mariners, garrison soldiers, and farmers, perpetually shadowed by the wars between the English colonies and the French and their Wabanaki allies; daily life there required both industry and vigilance.

Daniel married Patience Goodwin, who, by a curious turn of genealogical reckoning preserved in the family papers, stood to him as a sixth cousin ten times removed — a reminder of how often the colonial New England families wove and rewove their kinship across generations. From this union the register records a son, Daniel John Stone, born in 1689 and living until 1735, in whose name the anglicized surname was carried forward.

Daniel the Immigrant died on the 23rd of April, 1713, at Kittery, York County, in his seventieth year, having lived long enough to see his line firmly rooted in New England soil. He was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.