Bartholomew Bryant

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Bartholomew Bryant (1737–1832), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maine, marriage to Eleanor (Ellen) Brookings, his daughter Lydia, and his long lifespan spanning the colonial, Revolutionary, and early Republic eras of coastal Maine. Notable: early Scarboro settler lineage; Machias connection on the Down East frontier.

Bartholomew Bryant (1737–1832) was born on the eleventh day of July, 1737, at Scarboro, in Cumberland County, in what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. His birth in that coastal village placed him among the early generations of settlers along the southern Maine seaboard, a region in the mid-eighteenth century still marked by the proximity of the frontier, the rhythms of fishing and timber, and the steady congregational life that characterized New England's outlying communities.

He lived an extraordinarily long life of nearly ninety-five years, a span that carried him from the reign of George II, through the upheavals of the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the founding of the United States, the War of 1812, and into the presidency of Andrew Jackson. By the time of his death, the Maine of his youth — a district of Massachusetts — had become a sovereign state of the Union, admitted in 1820.

Bartholomew was united in marriage to Eleanor, also recorded as Ellen, Brookings. Of their union, the family record preserves a daughter, Lydia Bryant, born in 1767 and living until 1854, through whom the line descends to the present compiler. It was common in coastal Maine households of that generation for families to be larger than the surviving record suggests; what endures here is the documented thread of descent.

In the later portion of his life, Bartholomew removed to, or otherwise came to reside in, Machias, in Washington County, on the rugged Down East coast of Maine. Machias in this period was a small but storied port, remembered for the early naval engagement of June 1775 that had taken place in its waters during the opening months of the Revolution. There, on the nineteenth day of June, 1832, Bartholomew Bryant died.

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