*Anna C. Wilkins Baxter Foster

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna C. Wilkins Baxter Foster (1681–1773), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Salem, parentage, marriage, son, longevity, and colonial Massachusetts context. Notable: born in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts in 1681 — placing her childhood in the immediate vicinity and era of the 1692 Salem witch trials. Surname attribution is an unverified Ancestry hint.

Anna C. Wilkins Baxter Foster (1681–1773) was born on the 31st of October, 1681, in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts, the daughter of Benjamin Bray Wilkins (1652–1717). It should be noted at the outset that her surname attribution within this archive rests upon an unverified Ancestry hint, denoted by the asterisk preceding her name, and the reader is encouraged to weigh the entry accordingly.

Anna's early years unfolded in one of the most storied corners of colonial New England. Salem in the 1680s and 1690s was a tightly knit Puritan community of farmers, mariners, and tradesmen bound by congregational worship and the customs of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She would have been a girl of ten or eleven when the witchcraft trials of 1692 convulsed Salem Village and the surrounding parishes, an event that touched virtually every household in Essex County and that left its imprint upon the religious and civic temper of the region for generations afterward.

In time Anna married Ebenezer Foster, and from that union came at least one recorded son, also named Ebenezer Foster (1710–1769), through whom her line descended into the paternal branches that this archive traces. The repetition of given names from father to son was characteristic of the era, reflecting both family piety and the Puritan emphasis upon scriptural and ancestral continuity.

Anna lived to the remarkable age of ninety-one, dying on the 5th of June, 1773, in Middleton, Essex County, Massachusetts — a town set off from Salem and neighboring parishes in 1728. Her lifespan thus stretched from the late Stuart colonial period nearly to the eve of the American Revolution, encompassing the witch trials of her girlhood, the founding of new Essex County parishes in her middle years, and the gathering imperial tensions of her old age.

Anna was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.