DA Samuel Stratton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Stratton (1660–1726), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Concord, Massachusetts, parentage, marriage to Ruth Goble, his daughter Abigail Stratton, and the colonial Massachusetts context of his lifetime. Notable: lifelong Concord, Middlesex County residency spanning the late Puritan colonial era.

Samuel Stratton was born on the fifth day of March in the year 1660, in the town of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and there he lived out the entirety of his sixty-six years until his death on the eleventh of October, 1726. He was the son of Samuel Stratton (1625–1707), and bore his father's name into the second generation of the family's American settlement, a common practice among the English-descended households of seventeenth-century New England.

Concord in Samuel's lifetime was a town only a generation removed from its founding by Puritan settlers, who in 1635 had pressed inland from the coastal settlements to establish one of the first interior townships of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Concord of Samuel's youth and maturity was a community ordered by Congregational meetinghouse, town selectmen, and the rhythms of agriculture and husbandry. His lifespan encompassed a period of profound transformation in New England: King Philip's War in the 1670s, the revocation and restoration of the colonial charter, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 in nearby Essex County, and the long colonial wars with French Canada that shadowed his middle and later years.

Samuel married Ruth Goble, and of their union the family record preserves a daughter, Abigail Stratton, who was born in 1705 and who lived until 1763. Through Abigail the Stratton blood was carried forward into the generations that would, in time, descend to the compiler of this register. That Samuel lived to see his daughter into her twenty-first year before his own passing in 1726 suggests a long and stable household rooted firmly in the soil of Concord, where Strattons had taken their place among the founding families of Middlesex.

Samuel Stratton stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth great-grandfather, a forebear of the deep colonial generations from whom the family's Massachusetts heritage descends.