William Midleton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Midleton (1687–1769), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Dent, Yorkshire, his parentage, his marriage to Margret Mason, his son George, and historical context for late-Stuart and Georgian-era Yorkshire dale country.

William Midleton (1687–1769) was born in October of 1687 in the parish of Dent, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and there he lived out the whole of his long life of more than four-score years, dying in the same dale in 1769. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth great-grandfather, one of the early English forebears of the Hyten family register.

William was the son of William Midleton (1667–1699) and Alice Mason (born 1652). The elder William died young, in 1699, when his son was but twelve years of age, and the boy was thus left fatherless in the closing year of the seventeenth century. The Mason surname appears on both sides of William's life, for he in due course took to wife Margret Mason, joining the Midleton and Mason houses a second time in the records of Dent.

Of this union there is recorded a son, George Middleton (1720–1792), through whom the line descends to the compiler. The slight variance in spelling — Midleton in the elder generation, Middleton in the younger — reflects the unsettled orthography of English parish registers in the eighteenth century, when surnames were often written by the ear of the clerk rather than by any fixed standard.

Dent in William's lifetime was a remote dale parish in the Pennine uplands, a country of stone-built farmsteads, hill sheep, and small-scale knitting industry, with its people bound to the land through long-rooted yeoman and tenant families. William's lifespan covered the reigns of James II, William and Mary, Anne, the first two Georges, and into the reign of George III — an age that saw the union of England and Scotland, the rise of Hanoverian rule, and the early stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, though such currents touched the Yorkshire dales only slowly.

William was the compiler's eighth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.