Margaret Felt

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Felt (1632–1732), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maine, her marriage to George Rogers, her son Richard, her remarkable century-long lifespan, and the broader context of seventeenth-century coastal New England settlement. Notable: among the earliest English settlers of the Maine frontier.

Margaret Felt (1632–1732) was born in North Yarmouth, in what is now Cumberland County, Maine, and lived an extraordinary span of one hundred years before her death in Kittery, York County, in 1732. She stands among the earliest generations of English settlers on the rugged coast of the Maine colony and occupies a place in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an 11× great-grandmother.

The Maine of Margaret's birth was a sparsely populated frontier of fishing stations, timber camps, and scattered plantations clinging to the Atlantic shore. North Yarmouth and the surrounding settlements lay at the northeastern edge of English colonial reach, vulnerable to the harsh climate and to the recurrent conflicts that swept the region through the seventeenth century. Communities there were small, tightly knit, and dependent upon kin networks for survival; women such as Margaret bore the labor of household, garden, and child-rearing under conditions far removed from the more established towns of Massachusetts Bay to the south.

Margaret married George Rogers, and from that union came a son, Richard Rogers, born in 1643. Richard, like his mother, was granted a long life, surviving until 1743. That a mother and son should each have approached or attained the century mark is a striking circumstance in an age when life expectancy was measured in far shorter terms, and it speaks to a constitution well suited to the demands of the colonial frontier.

In her later years Margaret resided at Kittery, the oldest town in Maine, situated on the Piscataqua River across from the New Hampshire settlements. There she died in 1732, having witnessed nearly the whole of the colonial century — from the early plantations of her youth through King Philip's War, the upheavals of the witchcraft trials in neighboring Massachusetts, and the consolidation of New England under royal governance.

Margaret was the compiler's 11× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.