Emornem "Eme" Denning

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Emornem 'Eme' Denning (1677–1714), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Gloucester, Massachusetts, her parents Nicholas Denning and Emma Brown, her marriage to Eleazer Elwell, her son David Elwell, and the context of late-17th-century coastal Essex County life.

Emornem Denning, known familiarly as Eme, was born in 1677 in Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts, and died in the same coastal town in August of 1714, at the age of thirty-six. Her life thus unfolded entirely within the bounds of one of New England's oldest fishing communities, a settlement whose harbor and granite shoulders had been drawing English families since the 1620s.

She was the daughter of Nicholas Maine Denning (1645–1725) and Emma 'Emmy' Brown (1644–1697). The Dennings and Browns were among the established families of Essex County in the second half of the seventeenth century, a generation whose lives were shaped by the maritime economy of Cape Ann and by the religious and civic culture of Puritan Massachusetts. It was an unsettled era in the region: Eme came of age during the years immediately following King Philip's War, and her young adulthood coincided with the convulsions of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, which were centered only a short distance inland from Gloucester and which touched many Essex County households.

Eme married Eleazer Elwell, a man recorded in family tradition with the additional given names Isaac and Robert. The Elwells were likewise a Gloucester family of long standing. Of this union the archive preserves the name of one child, David Elwell, born in 1703 and dying young in 1732 at the age of twenty-nine.

Eme herself outlived her mother, who died in 1697, by some seventeen years, but she did not reach the longevity of her father, who survived her by more than a decade and lived to the age of eighty. Her death in the late summer of 1714 left her son David, then a boy of about eleven, to come of age without her.

Emornem Denning stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 9× great-grandmother.