Susanna Holmes

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susanna Holmes (1711–?), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Plymouth, Massachusetts, her marriage to David Miller, the issue of that union, and the colonial New England era context in which she came of age. Notable: deep Plymouth Colony roots in the early eighteenth century.

Susanna Holmes was born on the thirteenth day of October in the year 1711, in the town of Plymouth, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Her year of decease has not been preserved in the family record. She entered the world nearly a century after the founding of Plymouth Colony, in a community still shaped by its Pilgrim origins, its meetinghouses, and the agricultural and maritime rhythms of the New England coast. The Plymouth of her childhood was a settled town of modest farms and trading networks, its residents knit together by the long-standing covenants of Congregational worship and by extensive kinship bonds reaching back to the earliest English settlers of the Bay.

In the course of her life Susanna was joined in marriage to David Miller. The records preserved in this archive do not specify the date or place of that union, though it must be reckoned among the marriages of the early eighteenth century, a period in which young women of the Massachusetts colony commonly wed in their late adolescence or early twenties and established households within the orbit of their parents and neighbors.

Of the issue of Susanna and David Miller, the family register names one son, Captain Francis Miller, born in the year 1733 and departing this life in 1800. The military title borne by her son speaks to the era of his maturity, the years of colonial militias, the French and Indian War, and the long American Revolution — a generation that carried the inheritance of Plymouth forward into the founding of a new republic. Through this son the line of Susanna Holmes descended to the compiler.

Susanna Holmes was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother line, standing among the earliest of the Massachusetts forebears whose names this archive has been able to recover.