Sarah Folsom

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Folsom (1680–1746), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Exeter, New Hampshire, her marriage to Nathaniel Stevens, her son John Stevens, her death at Stratham, and the colonial New England context of her era. Notable: early colonial New Hampshire ancestry seated in Rockingham County.

Sarah Folsom (1680–1746) entered the world in the riverside town of Exeter, in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, in the year 1680. The Folsoms were among the early English families established in that corner of New England, and Exeter at the close of the seventeenth century was a small but consequential settlement on the tidal Squamscott, supported by sawmills, fishing, and the carrying trade with Portsmouth and the coast. It was into this colonial frontier community — still mindful of the recent troubles of King Philip's War and only a few years removed from the upheavals along the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders — that Sarah was born.

In the course of her life Sarah was joined in marriage to Nathaniel Stevens, taking her place among the early colonial families of the Piscataqua region. Of that union the family register records a son, John Stevens, born in 1704 and surviving until 1743. John's life thus largely preceded his mother's own passing, a sorrow not uncommon in an age when epidemic illness and the hazards of provincial life often disordered the natural sequence of generations.

Sarah lived through a remarkable arc of colonial history: the witchcraft alarms of the 1690s in neighboring Massachusetts, the long contests with France for the northern frontier, and the gradual maturing of New Hampshire from a cluster of plantations into a settled province. Her later years were spent at Stratham, a town carved from Exeter's broad early grant and incorporated in 1716, situated between Exeter and the Great Bay. It was there, on the 24th of May in 1746, that Sarah Folsom Stevens closed her earthly course, having attained the considerable age of sixty-six years.

Sarah was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.