Stephen SEAVEY, Capt.

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Captain Stephen Seavey (1690–1742), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial New Hampshire, parentage, marriage to Anne Fernald, his daughter Hannah, his death in Kittery, and era context on the coastal Maine–New Hampshire frontier of the early 18th century.

Captain Stephen Seavey (1690–1742) was born in 1690 in Rye, Rockingham County, in the Province of New Hampshire, and died in October 1742 in Kittery, York County, in the District of Maine, then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an 8× great-grandparent, his life threading through the maritime communities of the Piscataqua region during the formative decades of New England's eighteenth-century expansion.

Stephen was a son of William Seavey (1648–1733), placing him among the second and third generations of an English colonial family that had taken root along the rocky coast of New Hampshire in the mid-seventeenth century. Rye, his place of birth, was at that time a community of fishermen, farmers, and small mariners whose fortunes rose and fell with the Atlantic trade and the recurrent frontier alarms of King William's War and Queen Anne's War. To come of age in this place during the 1690s and early 1700s was to live within reach of both the shipping lanes and the unsettled inland borders, and the title "Captain" by which he was later known suggests a station of standing in his community, whether by militia commission or by sea.

Stephen married Anne Fernald, joining two old Piscataqua families whose names recurred frequently in the deeds, militia rolls, and meeting records of Kittery and the surrounding towns. Of their union is recorded a daughter, Hannah Seavey (1723–1815), whose long life would carry the family's memory deep into the years of the American Republic.

Stephen's death in Kittery in the autumn of 1742, at the age of fifty-two, came near the close of the long colonial peace and just before the renewed imperial wars of the 1740s drew the Maine coast once more into conflict.

Captain Stephen Seavey was an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.