Lydia Vaughan

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lydia Vaughan (1690–1765), a maternal-line forebear in the compiler's paternal-grandmother (PM) line and an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler. This entry covers her birth in colonial Boston, her father Silvanus Wentworth, her marriage to Benjamin Dresser, her daughter Lydia Dresser Holbrook, and her death in Kittery, Maine. Notable: early colonial New England roots spanning Massachusetts Bay and the District of Maine.

Lydia Vaughan (1690–1765) entered the world in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in the closing decade of the seventeenth century, a period in which the Massachusetts Bay Colony was undergoing profound transformation. Her birth in 1690 came only a year after the death of her father, Silvanus Wentworth (1659–1689), so that Lydia was raised without his presence — a not uncommon circumstance in a colonial society where mortality among young adults remained high and widows frequently shouldered the rearing of children alone. Boston in the 1690s was a bustling port town of perhaps seven thousand souls, the largest settlement in English North America, where Puritan religious life still shaped daily routines even as commerce drew the town outward into the wider Atlantic world. The infamous trials at nearby Salem unfolded when Lydia was scarcely two years of age.

In the course of time Lydia was joined in marriage to Benjamin Dresser, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Lydia Dresser Holbrook (1720–1806), who would in her turn carry the family line forward into the latter half of the eighteenth century and beyond. The transmission of the mother's given name to the daughter was a customary mark of affection and continuity in New England households of the period.

Lydia's later years were spent northward, in Kittery, York County, in the District of Maine, then still under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Kittery was among the oldest English settlements in Maine, a community of shipwrights, mariners, and small farmers situated along the Piscataqua River. There she died in 1765, having lived seventy-five years — a notable span for her generation — and having seen the colonial world of her childhood give way to the eve of revolution.

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