Eleanor\Ellen BROOKINGS

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eleanor (Ellen) Brookings (1743–1810), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, parentage, marriage to Bartholomew Bryant, motherhood, and the colonial-to-early-republic era in which she lived. Notable: her life spanned the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the early settlement of Down East Maine.

Eleanor Brookings, known also as Ellen, was born in 1743 in Scarborough, in York County, on the rugged Atlantic coast of what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She was a daughter of Joseph Brookings, a long-lived man whose own years stretched from 1720 to 1823, and of Sophia Ann Tappan, recorded in some lines under the older orthography Toppan, likewise born in 1720. The Brookings and Tappan families belonged to the coastal English stock that had settled the shores of southern Maine in the seventeenth century, where fishing, coasting trade, and the cultivation of modest farms sustained the communities clinging to the rocky harbors.

The Scarborough of Eleanor's girlhood lay along a frontier still uneasy from the long contest between the British colonies and New France. Her early years coincided with King George's War and, soon after, the French and Indian War, conflicts that shaped life in every Maine coastal town through militia musters, refugee movements, and the perennial fear of raids.

Eleanor was united in marriage to Bartholomew Bryant. Of this union is recorded a daughter, Lydia Bryant, born in 1767 and destined to live a long life, surviving until 1854. Through Lydia the line descended in time to the compiler's paternal grandmother.

At some point in her later years Eleanor removed eastward to Machias, in Washington County, far up the Maine coast near the Bay of Fundy. Machias in the latter eighteenth century was a frontier lumbering settlement, celebrated as the site of the first naval engagement of the American Revolution in 1775. There, in 1810, Eleanor Brookings ended her days at the age of sixty-seven, having witnessed in her lifetime the passage of Maine from colonial outpost to district of the new American republic.

Eleanor was a seventh great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.