Josiah Joseph Westcott

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Josiah Joseph Westcott (1734–1822), a seven-times great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial York, Maine, his marriage to Mary Hoyt, his son Richard, his long life in coastal Cumberland County, and the historical era spanning the colonial period, Revolution, and early Republic.

Josiah Joseph Westcott was born on the 28th of April, 1734, in the seaside town of York, in York County, Maine, then a part of the Massachusetts Bay colony. He entered the world during the long colonial peace that preceded the French and Indian War, in a coastal community whose fortunes were bound to fishing, timber, and the Atlantic trade. York in the 1730s was among the oldest English settlements in northern New England, a place where memory of earlier Indian wars and frontier hardship remained vivid in the parish and town records.

In the course of his early manhood Josiah married Mary Hoyt, joining two names long established along the New England seaboard. Of their union the family register preserves a son, Richard Wescott, born in 1761, whose own life proved brief, ending in 1797, some quarter-century before his father's passing. That Josiah outlived this son by so many years is itself a quiet testimony to the precariousness of life in that age, even for those who themselves achieved great longevity.

Josiah's adult years spanned a remarkable arc of American history. He came to maturity during the imperial wars with France, witnessed the rupture of the Revolution and the founding of the Republic, and lived on into the presidencies of the early nineteenth century. The coastal Maine of his later life saw the District of Maine separate from Massachusetts and enter the Union as its own state in 1820, an event he survived to see.

He died on the 13th of April, 1822, at Cape Elizabeth, in Cumberland County, Maine, two weeks short of his eighty-eighth birthday, having removed at some point from the York of his birth to that headland community south of Portland harbor.

Josiah was a seven-times great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.