DA Capt Jonathan Joseph Parlin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin (1698–1767), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Concord, Massachusetts, his parentage, his marriage to Abigail Stratton, and his recorded daughter Hannah. Notable: colonial New England roots in Middlesex County and a militia title indicating standing in Concord's pre-Revolutionary community.

Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin (1698–1767) was born on the 22nd of September, 1698, in Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, then a settlement of the British colonial province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the son of John Parlin (1666–1750) and Mary Hartwell (1667–1738), placing him in the second and third generations of Parlins to take root in the Concord meadows after the family's early arrival in New England.

Concord in Jonathan's lifetime was a town of orderly farms, meetinghouse governance, and a Congregational religious establishment that ordered both Sabbath and civic life. The Massachusetts of his early years still reckoned with the long shadow of the witchcraft trials of the 1690s, while his middle years coincided with the agricultural prosperity, expanding frontier tensions with New France, and the colonial militia musterings that would, in the generation after his own, bring Concord into the opening hour of the American Revolution. The title of Captain by which he is remembered indicates service in the provincial militia, an office of trust generally conferred by neighbors and confirmed by colonial authority upon men of established standing.

Jonathan married Abigail Stratton, joining two old Middlesex County families. Of their household, the record preserved here notes a daughter, Hannah Parlin (1740–1808), through whom the line descended toward the compiler. Other children may well have been born to the couple in the manner customary of colonial New England families, though only Hannah is documented in this register.

Captain Parlin died in 1767 in the same town of Concord in which he had been born sixty-nine years earlier — a span of life rooted entirely in one Massachusetts community, and concluded only a few years before the events at the North Bridge would forever alter the town's place in American memory.

Jonathan was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.