John Bryant

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Bryant (1716–1753), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Scituate, Plymouth Colony, his death at Blue Point in Scarborough, Maine, his son Bartholomew, and the colonial New England era context of his short life.

John Bryant (1716–1753) entered the world on the 23rd of April, 1716, in the coastal town of Scituate, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts — a community whose roots reached back nearly a century to the earliest Pilgrim settlements of New England. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an eight-times great-grandfather, and through him a New England maritime heritage flows into the broader Hyten family record.

Scituate in the early eighteenth century was a settled but still-rugged Atlantic town, its inhabitants drawn to shipbuilding, coastal trade, fishing, and the careful husbandry of stony fields. John was born into this world of meeting-house worship, town governance, and seasonal labor by tide and harvest. Plymouth County in 1716 retained the Congregational character of its founders, and birth, marriage, and burial were recorded as much by the church as by the civil hand.

In the course of his adult life, John removed northward to the District of Maine, then still administered as part of Massachusetts. He came to settle at Blue Point in Scarborough, within Cumberland County, a frontier coastal settlement on Saco Bay long contested in earlier generations between English settlers and the Wabanaki, and only recently resettled in lasting peace. The Maine coast in the 1740s and 1750s was a place of cleared farms, salt marshes, lumber, and small harbors, where families from older Massachusetts towns sought new land.

John was the father of Bartholomew Bryant, born in 1737, who would live a remarkably long life spanning into 1832 and through the founding of the American republic. Through Bartholomew, John's line carried forward into the generations that the family record preserves.

John Bryant died on the 2nd of October, 1753, at Blue Point in Scarborough, at the age of thirty-seven — a life cut short by the standards of any age. He stood as an eight-times great-grandfather of the compiler along the paternal-grandmother line.