John Hoyt (weaver by trade)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Hoyt (1710–1771), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire Colony, his trade as a weaver, his marriage to Lettice Hasty, his daughter Mary Hoyt, his death at Wells, York County, Maine, and the colonial New England context of his lifetime.

John Hoyt (1710–1771) was born in Portsmouth, in Rockingham County, within the New Hampshire Colony, and came of age in the seafaring and timber-rich communities that lined the rocky coast of northern New England. The Hoyt name was a long-established one in colonial New England, traceable to the earliest English settlements of the seventeenth century, and the family figured among the steady artisan stock from which the towns of the Piscataqua region drew their character.

By trade John was a weaver — a calling of considerable importance in a colonial economy in which household cloth production stood at the center of domestic life. The weaver served not merely his own household but his neighbors, transforming flax and wool into the linens and woolens that clothed the community. Such craftsmen often held a respected, settled place within their towns, and their looms were among the most prized possessions a family could hold.

John married Lettice Hasty, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Mary Hoyt, born in 1740, who would live a long life into the new American republic, dying in 1826 at the age of eighty-six. Through Mary the Hoyt blood was carried forward into the generations whose descendants would eventually be gathered into the present register.

John passed from this life in 1771 in Wells, in York County, then part of the Maine territory of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He thus did not live to see the rupture between the colonies and the British Crown, dying on the eve of the Revolution that would transform the world his daughter and grandchildren would inhabit. Wells in his day was a frontier town, long marked by the hazards of the French and Indian wars, and its weavers and farmers were the patient builders of a settled life in an unsettled country.

John was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.