Daniel Goodwin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel Goodwin (1620–1712), a ten-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth, emigration to colonial New England, his marriage to Margaret Chadbourne Spencer, his daughter Patience, and the era context of seventeenth-century settlement in the Province of Maine. Notable: distant Spencer kinship to Princess Diana; founding-era Berwick settler.

Daniel Goodwin was born in April of 1620 in Oxford, Suffolk, England, the son of Daniel Goodwin (1600–1625) and Dorothy Chapman Barker (d. 1623). Orphaned in early childhood — his mother dying when he was scarcely three, his father when he was about five — Daniel came into the world during the closing years of the reign of James I, a period when religious dissent and economic uncertainty were stirring many Suffolk families to consider the prospect of emigration to the New World. The great Puritan migration to New England would commence within the decade of his birth, carrying thousands of East Anglians across the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640.

Daniel himself would in time cross to colonial America, settling in the northern frontier of New England in what is now the State of Maine. He died in 1712 in Berwick, Maine, having attained the remarkable age of ninety-two — a longevity uncommon in his generation and a testament to the constitution required of those who endured the rigors of seventeenth-century colonial life. Berwick in that era stood at the edge of English settlement along the Piscataqua River, a community shaped by the timber trade, the sawmills of the Salmon Falls, and the persistent dangers of frontier warfare during King Philip's War and the subsequent conflicts with French and Indigenous forces to the north.

Daniel married Margaret Chadbourne Spencer, a woman of distinguished lineage; through the Spencer line she stood as a first cousin, nine times removed, to Princess Diana Spencer of the modern British peerage — a connection that links the Hyten descendants, however distantly, to one of England's most ancient gentry houses. Of their issue, the daughter Patience Goodwin (1653–1716) carried the line forward.

Daniel Goodwin was the compiler's ten-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.