Patience (6th cousin 10 x removed) Goodwin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Patience Goodwin (1653–1716), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Maine, parentage, marriage to an immigrant ancestor, and son Daniel. Notable: maternal kinship via the Chadbourne–Spencer line to the family of Princess Diana Spencer; deep roots in 17th-century York County, Maine.

Patience Goodwin (1653–1716) was born on the 23rd of March, 1653, in South Berwick, in the county of York, in what was then the Province of Maine. She was the daughter of Daniel Goodwin (1620–1712), a long-lived figure of the Piscataqua frontier, and of Margaret Chadbourne Spencer (1633–1670), whose maternal Spencer line carried the distant kinship — a first cousin nine times removed — to the family of Princess Diana Spencer of England. Through this lineage, Patience stood at the convergence of two strands of early New England settlement: the practical, sawmill- and shipbuilding-oriented Chadbournes of the Berwick country, and the steadily rooted Goodwins of the same district.

The Maine of Patience's childhood and young womanhood was a precarious place. The latter half of the seventeenth century along the York and Piscataqua rivers was marked by the conflicts known as King Philip's War and King William's War, during which the frontier settlements of Berwick were repeatedly threatened, and families along the river labored under the constant tension of cultivation, defense, and recovery. It was within this landscape of timbered uplands and tidal river-bends that Patience came of age.

She was married to Daniel Wadelstensteen, an immigrant whose surname suggests origins beyond the English-speaking Atlantic world — a reminder that even the early settlements of northern New England drew, on occasion, from a wider European stream than is commonly remembered. Of their union is recorded a son, Daniel John Stone (1689–1735), the surname evidently anglicized in the next generation, as was frequently the practice among immigrant families seeking accommodation within their adopted communities.

Patience died on the 4th of April, 1716, in Berwick, the same parish in which she had been born sixty-three years before, having lived through nearly the whole of that perilous first century of English Maine.

Patience was the compiler's ninth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.