Elizabeth Shapeleigh

Elizabeth Shapeleigh, whose precise dates of birth and death have not survived in the family record, stands among the earliest identifiable ancestors in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, situated ten generations removed as a 10× great-grandmother. Though the particulars of her life remain veiled by the passage of centuries, her place within the Hyten family register is secured through her daughter, Eleanor Trickey, born in 1660 and departing this life in 1725.

The Shapeleigh surname is one borne by families of note in seventeenth-century New England, particularly along the coastal settlements of what is now Maine and the northern reaches of Massachusetts Bay Colony. That Elizabeth's daughter Eleanor came into the world in 1660 and bore the surname Trickey through marriage places this branch of the family firmly within the first generations of English colonial settlement in the New World. The 1660s were a period of fragile permanence for the New England colonies: the Puritan order remained ascendant in Massachusetts, the Restoration of Charles II had only recently occurred in England, and the coastal frontier was a place of timber, fishing, and small farming communities clinging to the rocky shore.

Eleanor's lifespan, stretching from 1660 to 1725, would have carried her through some of the most turbulent decades of colonial American life, including King Philip's War, the Salem witchcraft episode of 1692, and the early imperial wars between England and France. Her mother Elizabeth, belonging to the generation prior, would have lived through the founding and consolidation of those very settlements.

No record of Elizabeth's parentage, marriage date, or place of burial has come down through the family papers. What endures is the simple, sturdy fact of her motherhood and her place in an unbroken chain of descent. Elizabeth was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.