Sarah Trask

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Trask (1714–1750), an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her Dorset birth and death, her marriage to Thomas Mitchel, her daughter Susannah, and the rural English context of early Georgian Dorset. Notable: an early-eighteenth-century English ancestor whose line predates the family's eventual emigration.

Sarah Trask (1714–1750) entered the world on the ninth of August 1714 in the village of West Knighton, a small parish nestled in the chalk-down country of southern Dorset, England. The Dorset of Sarah's birth was a settled agricultural shire of ancient parishes, where the rhythms of life turned upon the harvest, the parish church, and long-rooted family names that often persisted in a single locality across many generations. Hers was the reign of Queen Anne in its final summer, and her childhood unfolded under the early Hanoverian kings, in a region of England largely untouched by the dislocations that would later carry many English families abroad.

In the course of her short life Sarah was united in marriage to Thomas Mitchel, and from that union came at least one recorded child, a daughter named Susannah Mitchel, born in 1740. Susannah would in time live a long life of her own, surviving until 1819, and it is through her that Sarah's blood was carried forward into the generations whose record this archive preserves.

Sarah died on the twenty-eighth of July 1750 in Hilton, Dorset, a parish lying somewhat to the north of her birthplace but still firmly within the same county of her birth. She was not yet thirty-six years of age at her passing, leaving her daughter Susannah a child of about ten years. Such early maternal deaths were a common sorrow of the eighteenth century, when the perils of childbearing and infectious disease pressed heavily upon women of her station and era.

No record of occupation, dwelling, or personal circumstance beyond these particulars has been preserved in the present archive, and her memory survives chiefly through the line of descent she made possible. Sarah Trask was the compiler's eighth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.