Mary Hoyt

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Hoyt (1740–1826), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in coastal Maine, her parentage in the Hoyt and Hasty families of Scarborough, her marriage to Josiah Joseph Westcott, and her son Richard. Notable: her life bridged the British Colonial period, the American Revolution, and the early American Republic.

Mary Hoyt (1740–1826) was born on the twenty-first of December, 1740, in the seaside township of Scarborough, in Cumberland County, Maine, then part of British Colonial America. She was the daughter of John Hoyt, a weaver by trade, and his wife Lettice Hasty, both born in 1710. Into this household of cloth and craft Mary was raised, in a region where the rhythms of the Atlantic, the proximity of the coastal forests, and the trade of skilled artisans shaped the texture of daily life.

Scarborough in the middle decades of the eighteenth century was a modest but enduring settlement, its families bound together by intermarriage, congregational worship, and the shared labor of a colonial frontier still subject to the Crown. The weaver's loom, such as that worked by her father, was a fixture of household economy in such communities, producing the linens and woolens that clothed neighbors and kin alike.

Mary was joined in marriage to Josiah Joseph Westcott, and of that union there is recorded at least one son, Richard Wescott, born in 1761. Richard's life proved brief, ending in 1797 — a sorrow Mary lived to witness, surviving her son by nearly three decades. Through the course of her long life Mary saw her homeland transformed from British colony into independent Republic, witnessing in her middle years the Revolutionary War and in her later years the early decades of the young United States.

She died on the first of January, 1826, in the very town of her birth, having reached the venerable age of eighty-five. Her mother Lettice, remarkably, is recorded as outliving her by a year, a longevity uncommon for the age. Mary rests within the long Hoyt and Westcott presence of coastal Maine.

Mary was the compiler's seven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.