MARGARET CHADBOURNE SPENCER (Princess Dianna Spencer's 1st cousin 9X removed)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Chadbourne Spencer (1633–1670), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maine, her marriage to Daniel Goodwin, her daughter Patience, and the early-colonial New England context of her life. Notable: a documented 1st cousin 9× removed of Princess Diana Spencer.

Margaret Chadbourne Spencer (1633–1670) was born in South Berwick, in York County, in the District of Maine, then under the colonial jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay. Her life unfolded entirely within the rugged northeastern frontier of seventeenth-century New England, a region of fishing weirs, sawmills, garrison houses, and tidal rivers, where English settlement was still tenuous and where families clustered along the Piscataqua and Salmon Falls watersheds for mutual support.

Margaret bore the Spencer name, a lineage of some note in English genealogy; through this connection she stands as a first cousin nine times removed of Diana, Princess of Wales — a distant kinship that nonetheless ties the family archive to one of the more storied surnames of the English peerage. She married Daniel Goodwin, allying the Spencer and Chadbourne lines with the Goodwins, an early and enduring family of the Maine coast. From this union came at least one recorded daughter, Patience Goodwin (1653–1716), through whom the line continues into the compiler's own ancestry.

Margaret died in 1670 in Kittery, York County, Maine, at roughly thirty-seven years of age. Kittery in that decade was among the oldest English settlements in Maine, incorporated only in 1647, and life there was shaped by the constant pressures of weather, subsistence agriculture, maritime trade, and uneasy relations with the Abenaki peoples of the interior — tensions that would erupt into King Philip's War only five years after her death. That she lived and raised a child to adulthood in such conditions speaks to the quiet endurance characteristic of the women of her generation, whose names survive chiefly through the births and marriages recorded in parish and town books.

Margaret was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, standing among the earliest documented colonial-era ancestors of the Hyten family archive.