Fanny Tenney

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Fanny Tenney (1805–1846), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Down East Maine, her marriage to Jacob Allen, her son Samuel Chandler Allen, and the historical character of early-19th-century coastal Washington County. Notable: her New England roots in Columbia, Maine, place the family within the post-Revolutionary settlement of the Maine coast.

Fanny Tenney (1805–1846) was born in Columbia, a coastal township in Washington County, Maine, and stood in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a fifth-great-grandparent. Her birthplace lay in what was then still the District of Maine, for Maine did not achieve separate statehood until 1820, when Fanny was a girl of fifteen. Washington County in those years was a sparsely settled stretch of fishing villages, lumber camps, and small farms along the rocky Down East coast, a region whose families lived by the sea, the woods, and a stubborn Yankee Congregationalism inherited from earlier New England migrations.

The Tenney surname itself was one long established in New England, brought from England in the seventeenth century and propagated through Massachusetts and into Maine over successive generations. Fanny's life unfolded during a period when the young state of Maine was rapidly organizing its towns, its shipping industry, and its religious societies, and when families along the eastern coast were beginning to send sons and daughters westward into the expanding republic.

Fanny married Jacob Allen, and from that union came at least one son recorded in the family register, Samuel Chandler Allen (1827–1908), through whom the line descended toward the compiler. Samuel's long life — stretching from the Jacksonian era nearly to the eve of the First World War — would carry forward the inheritance of his Maine-born mother into a vastly transformed America. Fanny herself, however, did not live to see her son reach middle age. She died in 1846 at the age of about forty-one, leaving Samuel still a young man of nineteen.

Though the documentary record of her life is slender, Fanny Tenney's place in the family's descent is firmly fixed: she was a fifth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line, and one of the New England threads woven into a lineage that would later move far beyond the Maine coast.