Alice # MASON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Mason (1652–?), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Yorkshire, marriage to William Midleton, and the son who carried the line forward. Notable: she represents the deep English Yorkshire roots of the paternal-grandfather lineage in the mid-seventeenth century.

Alice Mason, born in May of 1652 in the village of Dent in Yorkshire, England, occupies a place of quiet importance in the deep ancestry of the Hyten family. The year of her death is not preserved in the record, yet her name endures through the line of descendants she set in motion and through the small but firm details that survive concerning her origins.

Dent in the mid-seventeenth century lay within the rugged dales of the West Riding of Yorkshire, a country of stone farmsteads, sheep pastures, and tight-knit parish communities. The years surrounding Alice's birth were turbulent ones for England: the Civil Wars had only recently concluded, Oliver Cromwell governed under the Protectorate, and the religious landscape of the north was alive with Dissenting movements, Quaker preachers, and the gradual loosening of established parish life. It was into this northern English world — one of plain living, hard winters, and steady labor — that Alice Mason was born.

In time Alice was joined in marriage to William Midleton. The record of their union, while sparing in its details, is significant for the family it produced. Their son, also named William Midleton, was born in 1687 and lived to the considerable age of eighty-two, dying in 1769. Through this son the Mason–Midleton line was carried forward across the Atlantic in succeeding generations, eventually flowing into the broader paternal ancestry of the Hyten family in America.

Little else of Alice's personal life has come down through the intervening centuries — neither the name of her parents, the circumstances of her marriage, nor the manner and year of her passing. What remains is the essential framework: a Yorkshire birth, an English marriage, and a son whose descendants would eventually find their way to the soil of the New World.

Alice Mason was a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.