Thomas Smith

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Smith (1688–1745), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Hail Weston, England, his marriage to Anne Bush, his daughter Elizabeth Smith, his death at Sandwich, and the broader context of late Stuart and early Georgian England in which he lived.

Thomas Smith (1688–1745) entered the world in July of 1688 in the parish of Hail Weston, a small village in Huntingdonshire, England. His birth fell in one of the most consequential years of English history: 1688 was the year of the Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange landed at Torbay and the reign of James II came to an end. Thomas thus belonged to the first generation of Englishmen to come of age under the constitutional settlement that followed, an age that gradually replaced the religious turbulence of the seventeenth century with the more commercial, outward-looking spirit of the early Georgian era.

Little is preserved in the family record concerning his upbringing in Hail Weston, but the parish lay in the gentle agricultural country of the East Midlands, a landscape of fields, small market towns, and ancient stone churches. In due course Thomas was united in marriage to Anne Bush, a union from which the family record preserves at least one daughter, Elizabeth Smith, born in 1708 and living until 1788. Through this Elizabeth the line continues into the generations that would, in time, cross the Atlantic and enter the Hyten pedigree.

By the close of his life Thomas had removed, or at least come to reside, in Sandwich, on the Kentish coast — one of the historic Cinque Ports and, in his day, a town of declining maritime trade as its once-busy harbor silted up. There he died on the 10th of May, 1745, at the age of fifty-six, having lived through the reigns of William and Mary, Anne, George I, and into the reign of George II.

Thomas Smith stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 9× great-grandfather, an early English forebear whose daughter Elizabeth carried the line forward.