Richard Wescott 1761

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Wescott (1761–1797), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in coastal Maine, parentage, marriage to Lydia Bryant, his daughter Nancy, and early-republic New England context. Notable: short life ending at age 35 in Portland, Maine, during the post-Revolutionary era.

Richard Wescott (1761–1797) entered the world on the twenty-eighth of September, 1761, in Cape Elizabeth, Cumberland County, in the District of Maine, then a northern outpost of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was the son of Josiah Joseph Westcott (1734–1822) and Mary Hoyt (1740–1826), a couple whose long lives spanned the seismic transformation of their region from colonial holding to independent American state. Cape Elizabeth in the mid-eighteenth century was a small maritime community on Casco Bay, its families bound to the rhythms of the sea, the timber trade, and the modest agriculture wrested from rocky soil; the names Wescott and Hoyt were both well established among the old New England planter stock of that coast.

Richard came of age during the tumult of the American Revolution and the uncertain years that followed. Coastal Maine endured British naval depredations during the war — most infamously the burning of Falmouth in 1775, an event that lay within living memory of every family of the Cape — and the rebuilding of Portland and its environs in the war's aftermath shaped the world in which Richard reached manhood.

He married Lydia Bryant, and from their union came at least one daughter recorded in the family register: Nancy E. Wescott, born in 1794, who would live a remarkably long life and not pass from the world until 1884, carrying her father's line forward by nearly a century beyond his own death.

Richard's life proved brief. He died in 1797 in Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, at the age of thirty-five, leaving his young daughter scarcely three years old. His parents would survive him by some twenty-five years, an inversion of the natural order not uncommon in an age when fevers, accidents, and the hazards of seafaring life claimed many in the prime of their years.

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