Abigail Davis

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Abigail Davis (1744–1837), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, parentage through her mother Mary Hinckley, her marriage to John Barton, her daughter Dorcas Barton, and her later removal to the Maine frontier where she died at the remarkable age of ninety-two.

Abigail Davis was born on the twelfth of September, 1744, in the old seaside town of Barnstable, in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, then a settled community of fishermen, farmers, and mariners on the south shore of Cape Cod. Her mother was Mary Hinckley, born in 1704 and likewise of the deep-rooted Hinckley families of Barnstable County, a lineage tracing back to the earliest Plymouth Colony generations. Mary did not live to see her daughter reach adulthood, dying in 1756 when Abigail was but twelve years old — a sorrow not uncommon in an age when childbed and contagion took mothers early.

Abigail came of age during the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, a period in which the towns of coastal Massachusetts were stirred by both political ferment and the religious legacies of their Puritan forebears. In due course she married John Barton, and from that union came at least one recorded daughter, Dorcas Barton, born in 1779 — a child of the new Republic, arriving in the years just following the close of the Revolutionary War. Dorcas would live until 1854 and carries the line forward toward the compiler.

At some point in her later life Abigail removed northward into the District, and later State, of Maine — a migration pattern common to many Massachusetts families of her generation, as the opening of interior Maine drew settlers into its river valleys and hill towns through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She died on the tenth of April, 1837, in Salem, in the newly organized Franklin County of Maine, having attained the venerable age of ninety-two years. Her long life had spanned the colonial era, the founding of the United States, the War of 1812, and the early decades of the young Republic.

Abigail Davis stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother (PM) line as a 6× great-grandmother.