Thomas Mitchel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Mitchel (c.1710–c.1807), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Dorset, England, his marriage to Sarah Trask, his daughter Susannah, his long lifespan, and historical context of 18th-century coastal Dorset. Notable: English ancestral roots in Cheselbourne and Portland, Dorset; remarkable longevity of nearly a century.

Thomas Mitchel (c.1710–c.1807) was born in the village of Cheselbourne, Dorset, in the south of England, and passed nearly a century later in the parish of St. George's, Portland, on Dorset's stony southern coast. His life thus spanned one of the most transformative centuries in English and Atlantic history — from the late reign of Queen Anne, through the Hanoverian succession, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the American Revolution, and into the early years of the Napoleonic wars. Cheselbourne in the early eighteenth century was a small inland Dorset parish of farming families, while Portland, where Thomas ended his days, was a windswept limestone peninsula whose inhabitants were chiefly engaged in quarrying the famed Portland stone and in fishing the Channel waters.

Thomas married Sarah Trask, and from this union came a daughter, Susannah Mitchel, born in 1740, who would live until 1819. Susannah carries the Mitchel line forward into the compiler's paternal-grandmother branch, linking the Dorset stock to the later generations of the family abroad.

The span of Thomas's recorded life — very nearly ninety-seven years — was extraordinary for any era, and especially so for the eighteenth century, when most men who reached adulthood could expect to see perhaps their sixties. That he survived to witness the close of the old century and the opening of the new speaks both to constitution and to circumstance. The coastal parishes of Dorset, while exposed to the hardships of fishing and stoneworking communities, were also known for clean sea air and tightly knit village life, which the records of the period associate with a degree of robust longevity among certain families.

Though the documentary trail concerning Thomas Mitchel himself is spare, his place in the family pedigree is secure: he stands among the English forebears whose descendants would, in later generations, cross to the New World. Thomas was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.