Stephen Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Stephen Allen (1672–1727), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Dorset, England; marriage to Elizabeth Phelps; daughter Elizabeth Allen; death at Cheselbourne; and era context of late Stuart and early Georgian rural England. Notable: among the deepest English roots documented in the PM line.

Stephen Allen (1672–1727) stands among the deepest documented English forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, his life unfolding entirely within the chalk downs and pastoral villages of Dorset. He was born on the 22nd of December, 1672, at Winterbourne Houghton, a small parish set in the rolling country northwest of Blandford Forum. His birth fell during the reign of Charles II, in a generation that would witness the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the early reigns of the Hanoverian kings.

Rural Dorset in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a landscape of sheep-walks, water meadows, and ancient market towns, where parish life was governed by the Anglican church calendar and the rhythm of the agricultural year. Families such as the Allens were rooted in the soil of these small communities, often spending generations within a few miles of their baptismal church.

Stephen married Elizabeth Phelps, and from this union came a daughter, Elizabeth Allen, born in 1703, who would live a remarkably long life of nearly ninety years, surviving until 1792. Through this daughter the Allen line passed forward into the generations that would eventually cross the Atlantic and join, through marriage, the broader Hyten kindred.

Stephen Allen died in September of 1727 at Cheselbourne, a village in the valley of the River Piddle some miles east of his birthplace. He was in his fifty-fifth year. His passing came in the opening months of the reign of George II, a moment when many of his Dorset neighbors could scarcely have imagined the colonial migrations that would carry their descendants across the ocean within two or three generations.

Stephen Allen was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.