Ester Hawthorn

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ester Hawthorn (1672–1768), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Minnigaff parish, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland; her parents John Hawthorne and Elizabeth White; her marriage to John Robert McKie; and her son John Robert MacKie McKay. Notable: remarkable recorded longevity of ninety-six years and deep Scottish Lowland roots.

Ester Hawthorn (1672–1768) was born at Larg, in the parish of Minnigaff, Kirkcudbrightshire, in the southwestern Lowlands of Scotland. Her parents were John Hawthorne (1646–1729) and Elizabeth White (1650–1685); her mother died when Ester was a girl of about thirteen, a sorrow not uncommon in an age when childbed loss and infectious disease frequently broke households apart before children reached maturity.

The Galloway country into which Ester was born was a landscape of moor, hill pasture, and small farming townships, where the Hawthorn name had long been seated. The latter decades of the seventeenth century in that region were tumultuous: the religious struggles known to Scottish history as the Killing Time pressed heavily upon the Covenanting south-west during Ester's earliest childhood, giving way after 1688 to the calmer Presbyterian settlement that would shape parish life through her adult years. Minnigaff parish, with its kirk by the Cree, served as the spiritual and civic center for families such as hers.

Ester married John Robert McKie, joining her line to one of the old Galloway surnames whose variants — McKie, MacKie, McKay — would be carried by her descendants across generations and, in time, across the Atlantic. From this union came at least one recorded son, John Robert MacKie McKay (1694–1765), through whom her bloodline continued forward into the family the compiler would one day record.

Remarkably, Ester lived to the age of ninety-six, dying in 1768 in the same Larg of Minnigaff in which she had been born. Such longevity was exceptional in any century, the more so in an era when most who survived infancy could expect perhaps half her span of years. Her life thus bridged the late Stuart kingdoms of her birth and the Hanoverian Britain of her old age.

Ester was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.