Margret Mason

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margret Mason (1688–1764), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Dent, Yorkshire, her marriage to William Midleton, her son George, and the era context of late Stuart and Georgian England in the Yorkshire Dales.

Margret Mason (1688–1764) was born in December of 1688 in the parish of Dent, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and she died there in April of 1764, having passed the whole of her seventy-five years within the same Dales community in which she had been baptized. She occupies a place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, standing as an 8× great-grandmother through the long Yorkshire branch from which the family's English roots descend.

The year of her birth fell within the tumult of the Glorious Revolution, when William and Mary acceded to the English throne and the religious and political settlements of the late Stuart period were being newly composed. Dent itself, tucked between the high fells of the Howgills and the heads of the Dee and Lune valleys, was in this era a remote pastoral parish whose inhabitants supported themselves chiefly through hill farming, hand-knitting of stockings — for which the Dentdale folk became locally famous as the "terrible knitters of Dent" — and the small trades attendant upon a market chapelry. It was within this close-knit Dales society that Margret lived out her entire life.

She was joined in marriage to William Midleton, and of their union is recorded a son, George Middleton, born in 1720 and surviving until 1792. Through George the line carried forward, eventually crossing the Atlantic in later generations to take its place among the American forebears whom this register chronicles. The variant spellings of the surname — Midleton, Middleton — are characteristic of parish-register practice in the period, before orthography was fixed by custom or print.

Margret Mason was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.