Elizabeth Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Allen (1703–1792), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Dorset, parentage, marriage to William Hooper, her son William, and her long life spanning eighteenth-century rural England. Notable: deep Dorset roots and a lifespan of nearly nine decades.

Elizabeth Allen (1703–1792) was born in August of 1703 in the small downland village of Cheselbourne, Dorset, England, the daughter of Stephen Allen (1672–1727) and Elizabeth Phelps (1674–1746). She passed her entire life within the chalk-and-clay countryside of central Dorset, dying on the fifteenth of February, 1792, in the village of Hilton, only a few miles from the parish of her birth. She lived to the considerable age of eighty-eight.

The Dorset of Elizabeth's lifetime was a deeply agricultural county dominated by sheep husbandry, dairying, and the slow rhythms of village life under the established Church of England. Her years spanned the reigns of Queen Anne, the first three Georges, and the early years of the French Revolution abroad — a remarkable arc of history witnessed from the quiet vantage of a rural parish. Cheselbourne and Hilton both lay in the chalk hills north of Dorchester, hamlets of stone and thatch whose populations had changed little over generations.

Elizabeth was joined in marriage to William Hooper in the year 1710 — a date suggesting an early betrothal or family arrangement preceding the full establishment of the household; her husband stood as the compiler's sixth great-grandfather along this line. From this union issued at least one recorded son, William Hooper (1738–1804), who carried the family name into the next generation and through whom the lineage descends to the present compiler.

Elizabeth's parents, the Allens and the Phelpses, belonged to the long-settled yeoman and laboring families of Dorset whose roots in the county reached back through the seventeenth century. Her mother survived into Elizabeth's middle years, while her father died when Elizabeth was a young woman in her twenties. Outliving both her parents and her husband by many decades, Elizabeth witnessed her son grow into his own maturity before she herself was laid to rest in Hilton in the closing years of the eighteenth century. She stands as an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.