John Parlin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Parlin (1666–1750), an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Massachusetts, his marriage to Mary Hartwell, his issue including Capt. Jonathan Joseph Parlin, and his death at Concord. Notable: a seventeenth-century New England forebear whose life spanned the Salem-era colonial Bay Colony.

John Parlin (1666–1750) was born on the thirty-first of March, 1666, in Cambridge, in the County of Middlesex, Province of Massachusetts Bay, and departed this life on the twenty-fourth of February, 1750, in the neighboring town of Concord, in the same county. His eighty-three years thus traced an extraordinary arc through the formative decades of colonial New England, from the second generation of the Bay Colony's English settlement to the eve of the great upheavals that would soon transform the American provinces.

The Massachusetts of John Parlin's youth was a Puritan commonwealth still governed under its original charter, a society of gathered congregations, town meetings, and tightly bound kinship networks among the families of Middlesex County. Cambridge, his birthplace, was already known for Harvard College and for its central place in the religious and civic life of the colony, while Concord, where he would end his days, lay a short distance to the west and stood among the oldest inland English settlements in New England. His lifetime encompassed the witchcraft trials of 1692, the loss and replacement of the colonial charter, King William's and Queen Anne's wars, and the early growth of the provincial towns into more settled and prosperous communities.

John Parlin was joined in marriage to Mary Hartwell, and from this union came at least one son recorded in the family register: Jonathan Joseph Parlin (1698–1767), who in later life bore the title of Captain, indicating a station of standing and responsibility within his town's militia or civic affairs. Through this son the Parlin line was carried forward and would in time, through many generations and the westward migrations of the family, descend at length into the Hyten household.

John Parlin was the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.