David Elwell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is David Elwell (1703–1732), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Gloucester, Massachusetts; parentage in the Elwell and Denning families; marriage to Sarah Mariner; surviving daughter Sarah; and the maritime context of early-eighteenth-century coastal Essex County.

David Elwell (1703–1732) was born on the 2nd of May, 1703, in Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts, and died in that same coastal town on the 18th of October, 1732, having lived but twenty-nine years. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an 8× great-grandparent, a forebear whose brief life nonetheless secured an enduring branch of the family.

He was the son of Eleazer Elwell (1673–1714) and his wife Emornem, familiarly known as Eme, born Denning (1677–1714). Through his father he descended from the Elwell line of Isaac and, before him, Robert — among the early English settlers who established themselves along Cape Ann in the seventeenth century. The simultaneous loss of both parents in 1714, when David was but eleven years of age, would have cast him into the care of kin during a period when Gloucester's economy was anchored in fishing, coastwise trade, and the timber and shipbuilding industries that drew upon the great forests of Essex County.

Gloucester in the opening decades of the eighteenth century was a hardy maritime community whose households were closely bound by intermarriage among the founding families. It was within this tightly knit world that David married Sarah Mariner, a union that produced at least one recorded daughter, Sarah Elwell, born in 1730 and surviving until 1795. The young Sarah was scarcely two years old when her father died in the autumn of 1732, a circumstance reflective of the precarious mortality of the era, in which sickness, accident at sea, and the recurring epidemics of colonial New England regularly cut short lives in their prime.

Though the documentary trace of David Elwell is slender, his place in the family record is firmly fixed: through his daughter Sarah, the Elwell line was carried forward into the generations that would, in time, contribute to the compiler's paternal-grandmother ancestry. David was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal-maternal descent within the PM line.