JEDEDIAH Newhall

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jedediah Newhall (1717–1759), an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death at Lynn, Massachusetts, his marriage to Ruth Ingalls, his daughter Sarah Molley Newell, and colonial New England era context. Notable: deep-rooted Essex County Massachusetts ancestry in the generation following the Salem witch trials.

Jedediah Newhall (1717–1759) was born on the eighteenth of April, 1717, in Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts, and died in that same town on the thirtieth of April, 1759, having scarcely passed his forty-second year. His life was thus bounded, beginning to end, by the colonial coastline of New England, in a community whose Newhall and Ingalls families had been knit together among the earliest English settlers of Lynn since the 1630s.

The Essex County of Jedediah's birth was a province still living within the memory of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, which had taken place but a generation earlier in the neighboring township. By the time of his youth, the region had returned to the steadier rhythms of Congregational worship, shoemaking, fishing, and modest husbandry that would come to define Lynn through the eighteenth century. The town was then a settled, churched community of long-established yeoman families, and the Newhalls were among its oldest and most numerous households.

Jedediah was united in marriage to Ruth Ingalls, herself the bearer of one of Lynn's founding surnames; the Ingalls line had been seated in Essex County since the first decade of English settlement, and unions between Newhall and Ingalls households were a recurring feature of the local genealogy. Of their issue, the family record preserves the name of a daughter, Sarah Molley Newell (1743–1860), whose remarkable longevity, if accurately reported, would carry the memory of her father's generation deep into the nineteenth century.

Jedediah's death in 1759 fell in the midst of the French and Indian War, a conflict in which Massachusetts towns such as Lynn furnished both men and provisions to the Crown's campaigns in Canada, though the family record assigns him no particular role in those events.

Jedediah Newhall was an eighth-great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.