Elizabeth PHELPS

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Phelps (1674–1746), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Dorset, England, her marriage to Stephen Allen, and her daughter Elizabeth Allen. Notable: rooted entirely in late-Stuart and early-Georgian Dorset, predating the family's transatlantic migration.

Elizabeth Phelps, born in March of 1674 in the county of Dorset, England, and laid to rest on the 28th of March, 1746, in the parish of Cheselbourne in that same county, stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line. Her span of seventy-two years was lived entirely upon English soil, in a corner of the West Country whose rolling chalk downs and small agricultural parishes had for generations sustained families of yeoman and laboring stock.

The Dorset of Elizabeth's birth was a land still bearing the fresh memory of civil war and Restoration. She entered the world in the reign of Charles II, came of age beneath the brief reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution that followed, and lived to see the houses of Stuart and Hanover both pass over the throne. Cheselbourne, the parish in which she ended her days, was then a quiet rural community of farms and cottages tucked into the Piddle Valley, the kind of village in which the rhythms of the church calendar and the agricultural year were one and the same.

Elizabeth was joined in marriage to Stephen Allen, and to that union was born at least one daughter of record, Elizabeth Allen, who came into the world in 1703 and survived until 1792, herself living through the whole of the eighteenth century and the upheavals of the American Revolutionary era. It was through this daughter that the Phelps and Allen blood was carried forward into succeeding generations and, in time, across the Atlantic into the family lines that would eventually settle in the American republic.

Elizabeth Phelps thus represents one of the deep English roots of the family tree, her life predating by nearly a century the migrations that would carry her descendants into the New World. She was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line.