Mary Hartwell

Mary Hartwell, born the sixteenth of February in the year 1667 at Concord, in Middlesex County of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, lived the whole of her seventy-one years within that same town, departing this life on the fourteenth of March, 1738. Her birth and burial in the same parish — a span of more than seven decades anchored to a single New England settlement — was not uncommon among the second and third generations of Bay Colony families, who tended to remain close to the meetinghouses, common fields, and burying grounds their forebears had established.

Concord in Mary's youth was a town of fewer than a thousand souls, settled scarcely three decades before her birth and still living in the long shadow of King Philip's War, which had threatened the Middlesex frontier in 1675 and 1676. The Concord of her middle years would have known the upheavals of the Andros government, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 to the east, and the gradual transition from Puritan colony to royal province under the charter of 1691. By the time of her death in 1738, the town stood on the eve of the religious revivals of the Great Awakening.

Mary was joined in marriage to John Parlin, and of this union is recorded a son, Captain Jonathan Joseph Parlin, born in 1698 and surviving until 1767. The military title borne by her son suggests service in the colonial militia, an institution central to New England town life in the eighteenth century, though the particulars of his command lie beyond the scope of this entry. Through this son the Parlin and Hartwell bloodlines descended into later generations and, in time, into the broader family that the present compiler traces.

Mary Hartwell stands as an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather, or PP, line.