SKELTON Felton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Skelton Felton (1681–1749), a paternal-grandfather line ancestor and 8× great-grandparent of the compiler. This entry covers his birth in Salem, Massachusetts, his marriage to Hephzibah Sheldon, his daughter Lydia, his death in Rutland, and the colonial New England era context. Notable: born in Salem only a decade before the witch trials of 1692.

Skelton Felton (1681–1749) entered the world on the sixth day of November in 1681, in the town of Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts — a community whose name would, within little more than a decade of his birth, become synonymous with one of the darkest episodes in colonial American history. Born just eleven years before the Salem witch trials of 1692, Skelton spent his earliest childhood amid a Puritan society gripped by religious anxiety, communal suspicion, and the convulsive proceedings that would leave a lasting imprint upon the conscience of New England. Whatever direct memory he carried of those tumultuous years is not recorded here, but the era and place of his upbringing form an inescapable backdrop to his early life.

In the fullness of time Skelton married Hephzibah Sheldon, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Lydia Felton (1712–1792), whose long life of eighty years would carry the family's blood forward into the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Skelton's later years were spent westward of his birthplace, in the inland town of Rutland, situated in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The early eighteenth century saw many Essex County families pressing into the central Massachusetts frontier, where new townships were being settled upon former wilderness tracts. Rutland in particular was incorporated in 1722, and drew settlers from the older coastal communities seeking land for their growing families. It was in Rutland that Skelton ended his days, dying on the eighteenth of April, 1749, at the age of sixty-seven — a respectable span for a man of his generation.

Skelton Felton stood within the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as an 8× great-grandparent, a deep colonial root reaching back through his daughter Lydia into the founding strata of Massachusetts Bay.