Elizabeth Smith

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Smith (1708–1788), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Alston, Cumberland, England, her parentage, her marriage to William Johnson, her son Samuel, and historical context concerning early-eighteenth-century life in the Pennine fells of northern England.

Elizabeth Smith was born on the fourteenth of July, 1708, in the parish of Alston, in the county of Cumberland, England, and there she lived out the whole of her eighty years, departing this life in March of 1788 in the same upland town that had cradled her infancy. She was the daughter of Thomas Smith (1688–1745) and Anne Bush (1688–1763), both of Cumberland stock, and she came into the world during the reign of Queen Anne, in the very year preceding the Act of Union's first full effects upon the northern shires.

Alston in the early eighteenth century was a remote market town set high among the Pennine fells, reckoned among the loftiest settlements in all of England. Its economy turned largely upon lead mining and the hardy husbandry that the thin upland soils permitted, and its parish registers preserve the names of generations of families bound to that bleak and beautiful country. It was within this community of miners, drovers, and small freeholders that Elizabeth passed her girlhood and her womanhood alike.

In due course she was joined in marriage to William Johnson, and from that union came a son, Samuel Johnson, born in 1730 and surviving until 1778 — predeceasing his mother by a full decade, a sorrow not uncommon in an age when parents frequently outlived their grown children. Through Samuel the Johnson line continued forward across the generations and, in time, across the Atlantic, eventually feeding into the lineage gathered within this register.

Elizabeth lived through the reigns of four sovereigns — Anne, George I, George II, and George III — and witnessed from her northern vantage the long century that bore both the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 (the latter passing nearby through Cumberland) and the early stirrings of the American colonial unrest. She died in the spring of 1788, in the parish of her birth.

Elizabeth was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.