Anthony Mason

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anthony Mason (1705–unknown), an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Dent, Yorkshire, his parentage, marriage to Agnes Dent, his daughter Sarah Burton Mason, and the context of early-eighteenth-century Yorkshire dale life. Notable: the Mason and Dent surnames tie the family deeply to the Dales region of northern England.

Anthony Mason, born in the year 1705 in the village of Dent in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, occupies a distant but well-documented position upon the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, standing as an eighth-great-grandparent. The closing date of his life has not been preserved in the family records, and his place of burial remains likewise unrecorded.

He was the son of Thomas Mason (1657–1743) and Sarah Mason (1667–1748), a couple whose long lives spanned the latter Stuart era and reached well into the Hanoverian age. Anthony was therefore reared in a household whose elders had known the upheavals of the seventeenth century — the civil wars, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution — and who lived to see the early years of agricultural improvement and Methodist awakening in the northern counties.

The parish of Dent, set in the high dales country at the western edge of Yorkshire, was in this period a settlement of stone-built farmsteads, sheep pastures, and hand-knitting cottages. The community was small, intermarried, and notably tied to the surname Dent itself, which Anthony's life touched directly through marriage. He took to wife Agnes Dent, whose family name was rooted in the very soil of the parish, and in so doing he wove the Mason line still more tightly into the fabric of that dale.

Of this union there is recorded a daughter, Sarah Burton Mason, born in 1731 and living until 1802 — a life of more than seventy years that reached across the whole of the eighteenth century and through the American Revolution. It is through Sarah that the line passed forward, eventually crossing the Atlantic in later generations and joining the broader streams of the Hyten ancestry in the New World.

Anthony Mason stands in the family register as the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal (PP) line.