Lydia Felton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lydia Felton (1712–1792), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Salem, Massachusetts, her parents Skelton and Hephzibah (Sheldon) Felton, her marriage to Ebenezer Foster, and her son Ebenezer. Notable: lifelong Salem residency in the generation following the witch trials.

Lydia Felton was born on the 28th of December, 1712, in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts, and remained rooted in that storied coastal town for the whole of her long life, departing this world there on the 7th of February, 1792, at the age of seventy-nine. Her parents were Skelton Felton (1681–1749) and Hephzibah Sheldon Felton (1692–1745), both of established Essex County stock. She entered the world only twenty years after the close of the Salem witch trials of 1692, and her childhood unfolded amid a community still bearing the memory of that grievous chapter — a Salem rebuilding its civic and ecclesiastical life under the watchful conscience of New England Puritanism.

Lydia came of age in a colonial Massachusetts increasingly oriented toward maritime trade, with Salem rising as one of the principal ports of the Atlantic seaboard. She was joined in marriage to Ebenezer Foster, and to this union was born a son, Ebenezer Foster (1732–1811), through whom the line continued down to the compiler's own generation. The naming of the son after his father followed the customary New England practice of perpetuating the paternal Christian name across generations.

The span of Lydia's adult years encompassed momentous transformations in the life of the Massachusetts Bay region: the consolidation of provincial governance under royal charter, the long imperial wars with France, and at length the American Revolution itself, the early years of which she lived to witness from her Salem home. She survived to see the new republic established under its Constitution, dying in the third year of George Washington's presidency.

Lydia Felton was a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as one of the earlier eighteenth-century forebears recorded in the New England branch of the family.