George Rogers

From the Hyten family archive; subject is George Rogers (1620–1655), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic relocation to colonial Maine, marriage to Margaret Felt, his son Richard, and the era context of mid-17th-century New England settlement. Notable: early colonial Maine settler at Kittery (Eliot), York County.

George Rogers (1620–1655) was born in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, in the second decade of the seventeenth century — a period when the English midlands were stirred by religious dissent, Puritan ferment, and the slow gathering of those impulses that would soon send tens of thousands of Englishmen across the Atlantic in the so-called Great Migration. Whether George himself crossed as a young man or in family company is not recorded in this archive, but by the close of his short life he had taken his place among the earliest European inhabitants of the District of Maine, then a northern frontier of the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction.

He married Margaret Felt, and from that union issued at least one son of record, Richard Rogers, born in 1643, who would live to the remarkable age of one hundred. The longevity of the son stands in striking contrast to the brevity of the father's life.

George died in 1655 at Kittery, in that portion of the township later set off as Eliot, in York County, Maine. He was but thirty-five years of age. Kittery in the mid-seventeenth century was a scattered settlement of fishermen, sawyers, and small farmers strung along the tidal reaches of the Piscataqua River, on the very edge of the English colonial world. Life there was hard, the winters severe, and mortality among men in their working prime was common, whether by accident, illness, or the hazards of the frontier. He left behind a widow and a young son of about twelve, who would carry the Rogers name forward into the eighteenth century and, through many generations, into the lineage gathered in this volume.

George Rogers was the compiler's eleventh great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.