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, parentage in the Mitchel-Trask union, marriage to William Hooper, her daughter Anne, and her long life spanning Georgian England. Notable: lifelong residence in Dorset; mother lost in early childhood.

Susannah Mitchel (1740–1819) was born before the 14th of December 1740 in the parish of Cheselborne, Dorset, England, the daughter of Thomas Mitchel (1710–1807) and Sarah Trask (1714–1750). Her early years were shaped by the rolling chalk downlands and small agricultural villages of central Dorset, a region whose patterns of life in the mid-eighteenth century were still largely governed by the rhythms of the parish church, the manorial estate, and the seasonal labors of husbandry. She was scarcely ten years of age when her mother Sarah died in 1750, a sorrow not uncommon in an era when childbed and recurrent fevers carried away women in the prime of life; her father Thomas, however, survived to a remarkable age, living until 1807 and outlasting his daughter's first decades of married life.

Susannah was joined in marriage to William Hooper, and from this union came at least one known daughter, Anne Hooper, born in 1764, who would in time carry the family line forward into the next generation, surviving her mother by some twenty years and dying in 1839. The Georgian Dorset in which Susannah raised her family was a county of modest market towns and dispersed hamlets, touched but lightly by the early stirrings of industrial change that were transforming the north of England; daily life remained close to land, hearth, and parish.

She lived a long life by the standards of her age, passing her later years in Hilton, Dorset — a village lying not far from the place of her birth — and died there about the year 1819, having seen the reigns of three Georges and the upheavals of the American and French revolutions from the vantage of an English country parish.

Susannah Mitchel was the compiler's seven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.