Samuel Stratton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Stratton (1625–1707), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic migration to colonial Massachusetts, his death at Concord, and the son who continued the line. Notable: an early English emigrant ancestor settling in Middlesex County during the first generations of Puritan New England.

Samuel Stratton was born on the tenth day of February, 1625, in the county of Kent, England, and departed this life on the fifth of December, 1707, at Concord in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, having attained the considerable age of eighty-two years. His life thus spanned the better part of the seventeenth century — an age of profound religious and political upheaval that drove many Englishmen across the Atlantic in search of conscience and opportunity.

Born in Kent during the early reign of King Charles I, Samuel came into the world but a few years after the first Puritan settlements had taken root in New England. The decades of his youth witnessed the English Civil War, the execution of the king, the Cromwellian Interregnum, and the Restoration of the monarchy — events which shaped the convictions and migrations of an entire generation. The Great Migration of the 1630s carried thousands of English families to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the town of Concord, founded in 1635, became one of the inland strongholds of that Puritan settlement.

It was at Concord that Samuel made his home and ended his days. The Middlesex County of his later years was a community of yeoman farmers, meetinghouses, and town commons, governed by the close discipline of Congregational worship and the prudent industry of an agrarian people. He lived through the trials of King Philip's War, the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, the witchcraft alarms of 1692 at nearby Salem, and the dawn of the eighteenth century.

Of his issue, the records preserve his son Samuel Stratton, born in 1660 and departing in 1726, through whom the family line carried forward into succeeding generations of New England.

Samuel Stratton was the compiler's ninth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal (PP) line, standing among the earliest English-born forebears of the family in the New World.