Patience Patricia Bryant Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Patience Patricia Bryant Johnson (1765–1846), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, her parentage, marriage to Stephen Otis Johnson, her son Joseph Brookins Johnson, and her death in Washington County, Maine. Era context: late-colonial and early Republic coastal Maine.

Patience Patricia Bryant Johnson was born on the 22nd of July, 1765, at Scarboro in York County, in what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She was the daughter of Bartholomew Bryant (1737–1832) and Ellen Toppan Brookings (1745–1810), and her arrival fell in the troubled decade preceding the American Revolution, when the coastal towns of southern Maine were closely tied to the maritime and fishing economies of greater Massachusetts. Scarboro, lying along the marshes and tidal rivers south of Falmouth, was in those years a community of mixed farming, lumbering, and seafaring families, and it was into this setting that Patience entered the world.

She was united in marriage to Stephen Otis Johnson, and of that union was born at least one recorded child, Joseph Brookins Johnson (1790–1838), whose middle name carried forward the surname of his maternal grandmother's family, the Brookings line of York County. The bestowal of such a maternal surname as a given name was a common practice among New England families of the period, by which the memory of allied households was preserved into succeeding generations.

In the course of her later years, Patience removed eastward along the Maine coast to Cutler, in Washington County, a small fishing and shipbuilding settlement near the easternmost reach of the United States, hard against the Bay of Fundy. The opening decades of the nineteenth century saw considerable migration of southern Maine families into these Down East townships as new lands were settled following Maine's separation from Massachusetts in 1820. There she died on the 13th of July, 1846, having attained the venerable age of eighty years, and having lived through the Revolution, the founding of the Republic, the War of 1812, and the early industrial era.

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