Ruth Goble

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ruth Goble (1663–1726), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Concord, Massachusetts, her parentage, her marriage to Samuel Stratton, and her descendants. Notable: she lived her entire life in colonial Concord, Middlesex County, during the era of the Salem witch trials and early Puritan New England.

Ruth Goble (1663–1726) was born on the fourth of August, 1663, in Concord, in the county of Middlesex, Massachusetts, and passed from this life on the eleventh of October, 1726, in the same town where she had drawn her first breath sixty-three years before. Her entire recorded life thus unfolded within the bounds of a single Puritan community, a circumstance not uncommon among the daughters of early colonial New England, where settled families often bound themselves to a particular parish across generations.

She was the daughter of Thomas Goble (1634–1690), placing her among the second native-born generation of English settlers in the Bay Colony. The Concord of her childhood was a frontier village still within living memory of its founding, hemmed by forest and ordered by the rhythms of the meeting house. Her young womanhood coincided with one of the most fraught periods in colonial Massachusetts history: the years surrounding the Salem witch trials of 1692, when she was twenty-eight years of age, and the broader unrest that gripped Middlesex and Essex counties during that era. Whether her family was touched directly by those tribulations is not recorded in this register, but the social and religious atmosphere of her adulthood was shaped unmistakably by them.

Ruth was joined in marriage to Samuel Stratton, and from their union came at least one daughter recorded in this line, Abigail Stratton (1705–1763), through whom the Goble blood passed forward into succeeding generations of the family.

She died at Concord in the autumn of 1726, having seen the colony of her birth transformed into a more settled provincial society under the new royal charter.

Ruth Goble was an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.