Eleazer (Issac, Robert) Elwell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eleazer Elwell (1673–1714), a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother line. This entry covers his birth, parentage, marriage to Eme Denning, his son David, and the colonial Essex County context of his lifetime. Notable: lifelong residence in Gloucester, Massachusetts during the late 17th-century New England period that included the Salem witch trials era.

Eleazer Elwell (1673–1714), son of Isaac and grandson of Robert Elwell, was born on the 16th of July, 1673, in Gloucester, in the county of Essex, Massachusetts. His life, from cradle to grave, was bounded by that same coastal town, where the Elwell name had already taken firm root through two preceding generations of the family in the New World.

Gloucester in the latter decades of the seventeenth century was a maritime and fishing community of modest size, perched upon the rocky shore of Cape Ann. Its inhabitants drew their living from the sea and from the stony soil of the surrounding tract, and they lived under the watchful governance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The years of Eleazer's youth coincided with a particularly turbulent chapter in colonial Essex County, for it was in the neighboring town of Salem, in 1692, that the infamous witchcraft trials convulsed the region, casting a long shadow across all the communities of the cape. Eleazer would have come of age amid the unease of that period.

In the ordinary course of life, Eleazer was united in marriage to Emornem Denning, known familiarly as Eme. Of their union is recorded a son, David Elwell, born in 1703, who survived his father but was himself to die young, in 1732. Through David the Elwell line was carried forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately, by many further generations, into the lineage of the present compiler.

Eleazer's days were cut short in 1714, when he was but forty-one years of age. He died in Gloucester, the town of his birth, and was thus laid to rest within sight of the same harbor that had cradled his earliest years.

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