Alice Rogers

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Rogers (1671–1696), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Kittery, Maine, her parentage in the Rogers and Libby families, her single recorded child Esther Hanscom, and the context of late-17th-century coastal Maine. Notable: short life span of twenty-five years during the frontier era of King William's War.

Alice Rogers was born on the twelfth of March, 1671, in Kittery, in the county of York, then part of the Province of Maine. She entered the world as the daughter of Richard Rogers (1643–1743), a long-lived patriarch of the Rogers line, and Sarah Libby (1653–1729), whose own family had taken deep root along the Piscataqua River. Kittery in this period was among the oldest English settlements on the Maine coast, a community of fishermen, shipwrights, and small farmers whose lives were shaped by the tides, the timber trade, and the proximity of the New Hampshire border just across the river.

The years of Alice's youth and womanhood coincided with one of the most perilous chapters in the history of northern New England. The frontier wars between the English colonists and the allied French and Wabanaki peoples—known to later generations as King William's War—brought repeated raids and unrest to the settlements of York County during the 1690s. Communities such as Kittery lived under the constant shadow of these conflicts, and the keeping of households and the raising of children were undertaken amid considerable hardship.

From Alice's union came at least one recorded child, a daughter, Esther Hanscom, born in 1692. Through Esther, the Hanscom name entered the family line, and the descent that would one day reach the compiler was carried forward. Esther herself would live until 1761, a span of nearly seventy years, far outlasting the mother who had given her life.

Alice Rogers died on the twenty-sixth of October, 1696, in the same Kittery soil that had received her at birth. She was but twenty-five years of age. Her father Richard would survive her by nearly half a century, a poignant reversal of the natural order of generations.

Alice was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.