WILLIAM HOOPER 1710 (6GG)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Hooper (1710–1793), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and baptism in Dorset, his parentage in the Hooper family of Hilton, his marriage to Elizabeth Allen, his only recorded child, and the 18th-century English rural context in which his life unfolded.

William Hooper, born before 23 July 1710 in the hamlet of Ansty near Hilton in the county of Dorset, England, was the son of John Hooper the Younger (1665–1753) and Ann Query (1675–1746). His baptismal record, preserved in the parish registers of rural Dorset, fixes the earliest certain notice of his life. He died on the 17th of November 1793 in Hilton, the same Dorset village that had been the seat of his forebears, having lived to the considerable age of eighty-three years.

The Dorset of William Hooper's lifetime was a country of chalk downs, scattered hamlets, and ancient parish churches, where families such as the Hoopers cultivated fields that had been worked by their ancestors for generations. The eighteenth century in rural England was an era of relative stability for the agricultural classes, though it was also a period in which enclosure and improving landlordism were beginning to alter the older communal patterns of village life. The Hoopers, by all indications, were rooted in this land long before William's birth and remained so long after his death.

He married Elizabeth Allen, and from this union came at least one son of record, William Hooper, born in 1738 and surviving until 1804. Through this son the Hooper line was carried forward into the next century and ultimately to the descendants who would, in time, cross the Atlantic and contribute their blood to the American branches of the family.

William Hooper of Hilton stands at a considerable remove from the compiler — eight generations distant — yet his name and dates anchor one of the deeper English roots of the family tree. He was an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, a man of Dorset whose long life spanned the reigns of Queen Anne, the first three Georges, and witnessed from afar the loss of the American colonies in which his posterity would one day flourish.