Mary Burnell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Burnell (1716–1771), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in North Yarmouth, Maine; her parents Robert Burnell and Patience Mills; her marriage to Penewell Pennell Barton; her son John Barton; and the colonial Maine context of her era.

Mary Burnell (1716–1771) was born in North Yarmouth, Cumberland County, in the District of Maine, then under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was the daughter of Robert Burnell (1690–1744) and Patience Mills (1685–1744), and she lived out her entire life in the same coastal town, dying there on the first day of January, 1771.

The North Yarmouth into which Mary was born was a frontier parish on Casco Bay, repeatedly settled and resettled through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as conflicts with the Wabanaki and the wars between the English and French powers in the northeast disrupted colonial communities. By Mary's childhood, the town had been formally re-established and was steadily growing into a community of farmers, fishermen, and small shipbuilders along the indented Maine coast. It was in this maritime and agrarian world — Congregational in worship, English in custom, and dependent upon the timber and tidal resources of the Gulf of Maine — that Mary came of age.

Mary married Penewell Pennell Barton, joining the Burnell and Barton families, both established in the North Yarmouth and broader Cumberland County region. From this union came her son John Barton (1752–1834), through whom her line descends to the compiler. Mary lived to see her son into early adulthood, though she did not survive to witness the rupture of the Revolution that would soon transform the British colonies in which she had spent her entire fifty-four years.

Both of Mary's parents had died in 1744, leaving her in adulthood without her mother and father for the latter half of her life. She herself died at the threshold of a new year and a new decade, in the same town in which she had been born, closing a life lived wholly within the bounds of one Maine community.

Mary was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.