Alice Hodgson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Hodgson (1718–1814), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Dent, Yorkshire, her father James Hodgson, her marriage to George Middleton, her daughter Isabel Middleton, and the historical context of the Yorkshire Dales in the long 18th century.

Alice Hodgson (1718–1814) was born in March of 1718 in Dent, a remote dale-village tucked among the high fells of Yorkshire, then part of the West Riding. She was the daughter of James Hodgson (1690–1766), a man whose own life had begun in the same northern parish in the closing years of the seventeenth century. Alice's birth into the Hodgson family placed her within one of the small, tightly bound farming and weaving communities for which Dentdale was, in that period, well known. The dale in the early eighteenth century was a place of stone-walled holdings, hand-knitting cottage industry, and parish life centred upon St. Andrew's Church, and it was within that close-knit landscape that her early years unfolded.

Alice came in time to marry George Middleton, joining her line with that of the Middleton family. Of their union, the surviving record names a daughter, Isabel Middleton (1761–1822), through whom the family thread would be carried forward into the next generation. The considerable interval between Alice's own birth and Isabel's suggests, in the manner of the era, a long married life and perhaps further children whose names have not descended to the present compilation.

Alice's lifespan was singularly long. Born in the reign of George I, she lived through the whole of the Georgian age — the Jacobite risings, the loss of the American colonies, the upheavals of the French Revolution, and the long Napoleonic wars — and died at Dent on the 22nd of March 1814, at the remarkable age of ninety-six. That she passed her final days in the same Yorkshire parish in which she had been born nearly a century earlier speaks to the rooted character of dales families in that age, when generations were often raised, wed, and buried within sight of the same hills.

Alice Hodgson was a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.