Mary Hinckley

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Hinckley (1704–1756), a seven-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in West Barnstable, her life in colonial Massachusetts, her daughter Abigail Davis, and the broader era of early eighteenth-century Cape Cod. Notable: deep Barnstable, Massachusetts colonial roots in the Hinckley family line.

Mary Hinckley was born on the twenty-fifth of February, 1704, in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, and passed from this life on the thirty-first of March, 1756, in Barnstable, Barnstable County, having lived the whole of her fifty-two years within the bounds of the same Cape Cod township in which she had drawn her first breath. Hers was a life rooted, in the manner of so many colonial Massachusetts women of her generation, in a single place across a single lifetime — a continuity that bound the Hinckley family firmly to the soil of Barnstable County.

The Barnstable of Mary's childhood and womanhood was an established Puritan settlement of more than a half-century's standing, its meetinghouse, fields, and harbor shaping the rhythms of daily life. The Hinckley name itself was one of long standing in the town, the family having figured among its earliest English settlers, and Mary entered the world bearing that heritage. She came of age during the closing years of Queen Anne's reign and lived through the long ministry of the Hanoverian kings, witnessing in her later years the unsettled prelude to the French and Indian War, which broke out in earnest only two years before her death.

Of Mary's domestic life, the record preserves the name of one daughter, Abigail Davis, born in 1744 — when Mary herself was already forty years of age — and who would live a remarkably long life of her own, surviving until 1837. Through Abigail, Mary's line passed forward into the generations that would carry the family westward in the great migrations of the nineteenth century, eventually joining the broader stream of ancestry recorded in this register.

Mary Hinckley died in Barnstable in the spring of 1756 and stands in the compiler's pedigree as a seven-times great-grandmother upon the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.