DA Abigail STRATTON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Abigail Stratton (1705–1763), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Concord, Massachusetts, her parentage, marriage to Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin, her daughter Hannah Parlin, and her death in Carlisle. Notable: colonial New England roots in Middlesex County during the early 18th century.

Abigail Stratton was born on the 24th of January, 1705, in the town of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, then part of British Colonial America. She entered the world as a daughter of Samuel Stratton (1660–1726) and his wife Ruth Goble (1663–1726), a household firmly rooted in the Puritan-descended communities of eastern Massachusetts. Concord at the dawn of the eighteenth century was a settled inland town of roughly seventy years' standing, its meetinghouse and farms organized around the agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms common to Middlesex County villages of that period.

In the course of her life Abigail was united in marriage to Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin, a union that joined two well-established colonial families of the region. The military title borne by her husband reflects an era in which provincial militia service was a customary expectation of able-bodied men, and captaincies were marks of standing in the local community during the long sequence of colonial conflicts that shaped New England in the first half of the eighteenth century.

From this marriage came at least one recorded daughter, Hannah Parlin, born in 1740 and surviving until 1808. Through Hannah the Stratton-Parlin line carried forward into the generations that would eventually descend to the compiler of this register.

Abigail lived through a span of dramatic transformation in the Massachusetts colony — the rise of new towns from older parent settlements, the gradual decline of the strict Puritan order, and the growing tensions that would in time culminate in colonial independence, though she did not live to witness that latter event. She died on the 14th of August, 1763, in Carlisle, Middlesex County, a town that had itself been carved out from neighboring Concord and Acton lands during her lifetime. She was fifty-eight years of age at her passing.

Abigail Stratton was a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.