Hannah Anna Curtis

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hannah Anna Curtis (1665–1737), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Kittery, Maine, her parentage under Dr. Thomas Curtis, her marriage to Jabez Jenkins, her daughter Sarah, and the broader context of late-17th-century coastal New England under the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Hannah Anna Curtis was born in May of 1665 in Kittery, in the county of York, then part of the Province of Maine under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She entered the world during a turbulent chapter of New England history, when the small coastal settlements of southern Maine balanced the demands of fishing, shipbuilding, and timber against the constant tensions of frontier life. Kittery, established only a generation before her birth, was at that time one of the northernmost English-speaking communities in the colonies, and its families were closely intertwined through marriage, trade, and the shared hardships of the wilderness.

She was the daughter of Dr. Thomas Curtis (1619–1681), whose profession as a physician placed the family within the modest professional class of the colony. Her father's death in 1681, when Hannah was about sixteen years of age, would have come at a formative period in her young life, on the eve of the upheavals that defined the closing decades of the seventeenth century in New England, including King William's War and the unsettling years surrounding the Salem trials of 1692.

Hannah was joined in marriage to Jabez H. Jenkins, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Sarah Jenkins, born in 1689 and living until 1741. Through Sarah, Hannah's line carried forward into the eighteenth century and, eventually, into the broader Hyten ancestry.

Hannah lived to the considerable age of seventy-one, a notable span for her generation, and died on the 18th of February, 1737, in the same Kittery community where she had been born. Her life thus bridged the early settlement era of coastal Maine and the maturing colonial society of the early Georgian period.

Hannah Anna Curtis was a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.