Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers (1643–1743) was born in Kittery, in York County on the southern coast of Maine, and there, a full century later, he closed his life on the eleventh day of January, 1743. His extraordinary span of one hundred years places him among the longest-lived ancestors recorded in the Hyten family register, and his entire life was bound to the single town of his birth — a striking constancy in an age when colonial New Englanders frequently moved in search of land.

He was the son of George Rogers (1620–1655) and Margaret Felt (1632–1732). His father died when Richard was no more than twelve years of age, leaving his mother — herself remarkably long-lived, surviving to the year 1732 — to oversee the household. The Rogers and Felt families were among the early English settlers of the Piscataqua region, where Kittery, chartered in 1647, stood as the oldest town in Maine and a frontier of the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction.

Richard married Sarah Libby, joining two of the established Kittery families, for the Libbys had likewise put down deep roots along the Maine coast in the mid-seventeenth century. To this union was born a daughter, Alice Rogers (1671–1696), whose own life was cut short at the age of twenty-five — a sorrowful loss her father, by then in his fifties, lived nearly half a century to remember.

The Kittery of Richard's lifetime was a community shaped by fishing, shipbuilding, timber, and the long shadow of the frontier wars between English settlers, French colonists, and the Wabanaki peoples. He lived through King Philip's War, King William's War, Queen Anne's War, and the early stirrings of the colonial conflicts that would eventually frame New England's identity. That he endured these turbulent decades in his native town to so great an age is itself a quiet testament to a life of resilience.

Richard was the compiler's 10× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.