Ezekiel Needham

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ezekiel Needham (1670–1735), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth at Lynn in colonial Massachusetts, his parentage, his marriage to Priscilla Halsey, his daughter Mary, his death at Wrentham, and the broader context of late seventeenth-century Essex County life.

Ezekiel Needham was born on the thirteenth day of May in the year 1670, in the town of Lynn, in Essex County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and departed this life in 1735 at Wrentham, in what would later be designated Norfolk County of the same Commonwealth. His sixty-five years thus spanned a remarkable transformation in the life of New England — from the latter days of the Puritan oligarchy through the turbulence of King Philip's War, the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, the upheavals of the witchcraft trials in neighboring Salem and Andover during his young manhood, and into the more settled provincial order of the early eighteenth century.

He was the son of Daniel Nathaniel Needham (1638–1717) and Ruth Chadwell Needham (1640–1719), both of Essex County stock and of the generation that had built up the coastal towns north of Boston in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Lynn in the year of Ezekiel's birth was an established Puritan community known for its tanneries and shoemaking trades, and it stood within a few miles of the Salem Village whose later notoriety would touch every family of the county in memory if not in fact.

Ezekiel married Priscilla Halsey, and from their union is recorded a daughter, Mary Holt Needham, born in 1701 and living until 1768. Through Mary the Needham line descends into the families that would in time carry the lineage westward and southward through the generations.

The removal of Ezekiel's household from the Essex coast to Wrentham, a frontier town settled in the latter seventeenth century on the road between Boston and Providence, reflected a common pattern of his generation, as the sons and daughters of the first-comers sought lands further inland from the crowded shore towns of their birth.

Ezekiel Needham was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.