William Midleton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Midleton (1667–1699), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Yorkshire, his death in colonial Massachusetts, his marriage to Alice Mason, and his son William. Notable: transatlantic migration from England to Boston in the late seventeenth century.

William Midleton (1667–1699) was born in May of 1667 in Dent, a parish set among the dales of Yorkshire in the north of England. The Yorkshire of his childhood was a region of upland farming, weaving households, and dissenting religious communities still negotiating their place under the restored Stuart monarchy. It was a country well acquainted with emigration, for in those decades a steady current of English men and women left the northern counties for the New World in search of land, livelihood, and religious latitude.

William took as his wife Alice Mason, and to that union was born at least one son, William Midleton, in 1687. The younger William would live a long life, surviving until 1769, and through him the line descended into the generations that the present register records.

At some point in his comparatively brief life, William removed from Yorkshire across the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay, for it was in Boston, in Suffolk County, that he died on the 3rd of March 1699, aged but thirty-one years. Boston at the close of the seventeenth century was a busy seaport of perhaps seven thousand souls, the commercial and ecclesiastical heart of New England, and a town still unsettled by the recent witchcraft trials at nearby Salem and by ongoing frontier warfare with the French and their allies to the north. Into this turbulent colonial world William carried whatever of his Yorkshire upbringing he had preserved.

His death at so young an age left his son William, then but twelve years old, to carry the family forward. The particular circumstances of his passing are not recorded in the archive, though early death was a common fate in the crowded and epidemic-prone port towns of the period.

William Midleton was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and stands among the earliest English forebears whose passage to America the family register has preserved.