Silvanus Wentworth

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Silvanus Wentworth (1659–1689), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Massachusetts, his death in New Hampshire, the lone recorded child Lydia Vaughan, and era context of late 17th-century New England. Notable: he died young in 1689, the year of the Cocheco Massacre at Dover.

Silvanus Wentworth (1659–1689) was born in Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and died, only thirty years later, in Dover, Strafford County, in the colony of New Hampshire. Though brief, his life spanned one of the most volatile generations in early New England — a generation that came of age under royal charters, witnessed King Philip's War, and lived along a northern frontier perpetually contested between English settlers, French interests, and the Abenaki and Pennacook peoples.

Rowley, the town of his birth, had been founded in 1639 by Yorkshire emigrants under the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers, and by the 1660s it remained a small Puritan agricultural community of weavers and husbandmen along the Merrimack approach. Dover, where Silvanus eventually settled and died, was older still — one of the original four towns of New Hampshire — and stood notably exposed at the colony's edge. The year of his death, 1689, was the year of the Cocheco Massacre at Dover, in which a coordinated raid devastated the settlement and ushered in King William's War on the northern frontier. Whether Silvanus's early death was bound up with those events the surviving family record does not say.

He left at least one child known to this archive: a daughter, Lydia Vaughan, born in 1690 — the year after his death — and living until 1765. Through Lydia the Wentworth blood passed forward into the Vaughan line and, in time, into the maternal ancestry of the compiler's paternal grandmother. The Wentworth surname itself was an old and well-established one in colonial New England, carried by families whose descendants would rise to considerable prominence in New Hampshire civic life in the eighteenth century, though Silvanus's own immediate household lay outside that public record.

Silvanus Wentworth was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.