Lydia Bryant

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lydia Bryant (1767–1854), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, her parentage in the Bryant and Brookings families, her marriage to Richard Wescott, her daughter Nancy, and the era context of Down East Maine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Lydia Bryant was born in 1767 at Machiasport, in Washington County on the rugged eastern coast of Maine, and died on the 21st of August, 1854, at Portland in Cumberland County, having lived a remarkable span of nearly eighty-seven years. She entered the world only a few years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, and her native Machiasport — a small maritime settlement at the mouth of the Machias River — was itself the site of early Revolutionary naval action, lending her birthplace a particular distinction in the annals of the young republic. The Down East coast of Maine in this period was a country of fishermen, shipbuilders, and timber men, where settlements clung to the inlets and bays of a vast Atlantic frontier.

She was the daughter of Bartholomew Bryant (1737–1832) and Eleanor, sometimes called Ellen, Brookings (1743–1810), both of whom belonged to the hardy coastal families of New England. Her father lived to the venerable age of ninety-five, and her mother to sixty-seven, suggesting a household of considerable endurance from which Lydia herself plainly inherited her long life.

Lydia was joined in marriage to Richard Wescott, a union recorded in the year 1761. From this marriage came a daughter, Nancy E. Wescott (1794–1884), who likewise lived into the latter part of the nineteenth century and carried the family line forward through ninety years of her own.

Lydia's later years were passed in Portland, the principal city of Cumberland County and the commercial capital of Maine, where she died in 1854 — a year already shadowed by the gathering sectional crisis that would soon divide the nation. She had witnessed the founding of the United States, the War of 1812, and the early industrial transformation of New England.

Lydia was the compiler's 6× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.