Susannah Mitchel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susannah Mitchel (1740–1819), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Dorset, England, her marriage to William Hooper, her daughter Anne, her death in Hilton, and context for rural Dorset life in the late Georgian era.

Susannah Mitchel was born before the 14th of December, 1740, in the parish of Cheselborne, in the county of Dorset, England — the date of her baptism in that parish marking the earliest certain record of her life. She lived the whole of her seventy-eight years within the bounds of rural Dorset, a region of chalk downland, sheep pasture, and small agricultural villages whose parish life in the eighteenth century revolved around the Church of England and the cycles of the farming year. Cheselborne and its neighbouring villages were quiet places, little touched by the industrial transformations beginning to reshape the north of England, and the families who dwelt there were generally bound to the land and to one another across several generations.

In the course of her life, Susannah was united in marriage to William Hooper. From this union came at least one daughter recorded in the family register: Anne Hooper, born in 1764 and surviving until 1839. Through Anne the line continued forward into the generations that would eventually carry the family across the Atlantic and into the descent of the present compiler.

The latter part of Susannah's life unfolded during the long reign of George III, an age that encompassed the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the gradual movement of rural English populations toward the growing towns and toward emigration. Whether such great events touched the household at Hilton in any direct way the register does not say. There Susannah passed her final years, and there, about the year 1819, she died and was laid to rest.

Susannah Mitchel stands in the family record as a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, an early Dorset matriarch of the English ancestry preserved in this archive.