Elizabeth Bacon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Bacon (1692–1737), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Roxbury, Massachusetts, her parentage, her death in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and her son Samuel Knowles. Notable: born in Roxbury in 1692, the very year of the Salem witch trials.

Elizabeth Bacon (1692–1737) was born on the sixth of May, 1692, in Roxbury, Suffolk County, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, a settled Puritan town adjoining Boston that had been established more than sixty years before her birth. She was a daughter of Jacob Bacon (1654–1709) and Elizabeth Knight Bacon (1656–1713), both of long-standing New England stock. The year of her birth coincided precisely with the upheaval of the Salem witch trials, then unfolding only a short distance to the north — a season of fear and accusation that touched the religious and civic life of every Massachusetts household, even those, like the Bacons of Roxbury, who stood apart from the proceedings themselves.

Elizabeth came of age in the closing years of the seventeenth century, when colonial Massachusetts was reshaping itself under a new provincial charter and when the small farming and merchant towns surrounding Boston were steadily expanding northward and eastward. In the decades following her birth, settlement pressed into the District of Maine, then still administered as part of Massachusetts, and it was to that frontier coast that Elizabeth's own life would eventually carry her.

She bore a son, Samuel Knowles (1733–1797), through whom her line passes into the compiler's own ancestry. Samuel was born when Elizabeth was already past forty years of age, and he would survive her by some six decades, living to see the close of the American Revolution and the founding years of the new Republic.

Elizabeth Bacon died on the sixth of June, 1737, in Cape Elizabeth, Cumberland County, on the rocky Atlantic coast of what is now Maine. She was forty-five years of age. Her resting place lay far from the Roxbury of her birth, a measure of the steady northeastward drift of New England families across her generation.

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