*Ebenezer Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ebenezer Foster (1677–1718), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Ipswich, parentage, marriage, sole recorded child, death in Rowley, and the colonial Massachusetts context of his life. Notable: his lifespan spanned the era of the Salem witch trials and post-trial recovery in Essex County, Massachusetts.

Ebenezer Foster (1677–1718) entered the world on the fifth of August, 1677, in the town of Ipswich, Essex County, Massachusetts, and departed this life on the twenty-fifth of February, 1718, in the neighboring town of Rowley, scarcely forty years and six months later. He was a son of John Foster (1616–1688) and Lydia K. Burbank (1644–1692), and within the broader Hyten family register he occupies a place of distinct depth, standing as an eight-times great-grandfather of the compiler along the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.

Ebenezer's childhood unfolded in an Essex County still raw with the memory and aftermath of the Salem witch trials of 1692, the year in which his own mother passed from this life. The trials had convulsed the towns of Essex County only a short ride from Ipswich, and the communities in which young Ebenezer came of age were shaped, in those years, by the slow and uneasy work of moral reckoning, restitution, and the rebuilding of trust among neighbors. New England in the closing decades of the seventeenth century remained a land of small agrarian townships, Congregational meeting-houses, and tightly knit kindreds whose lives turned upon the rhythms of planting, harvest, and Sabbath.

He took to wife Anna C. Wilkins Baxter Foster, whose connection to the family is recorded here, though it should be noted in candor that this spousal linkage carries the asterisk of an unverified Ancestry hint and awaits firmer documentary confirmation. Of their union the register preserves the name of one son, Ebenezer Foster (1710–1769), who would carry the paternal name and line forward into the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

Ebenezer the elder died in Rowley in the winter of 1718, leaving his young son a child of but eight years. He stands in the Hyten archive as the compiler's eight-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather line.