Lettice Hasty

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lettice Hasty (1710–1827), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Ulster, marriage to weaver John Hoyt, daughter Mary, death in coastal Maine, and the era context of the Scots-Irish Ulster migration to colonial New England in the early 18th century.

Lettice Hasty (1710–1827) was born in Londonderry, in County Londonderry, Ulster, in the north of Ireland. Her birth fell within the great wave of Scots-Irish life that, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, would carry tens of thousands of Ulster-born families across the Atlantic to the British colonies in America. Londonderry in that era was a walled city of weavers, merchants, and Presbyterian congregations, still bearing the memory of its famous siege of 1689 and bound tightly to the linen trade that shaped so much of Ulster's economy and outward migration.

In the course of her long life, Lettice was joined in marriage to John Hoyt, a weaver by trade. The pairing was a fitting one for a woman of Ulster origin, for the linen looms of the north of Ireland had long made weaving an honored and familiar craft, and weavers were among those most readily welcomed in the growing coastal towns of New England. From this union came at least one daughter recorded in the family register: Mary Hoyt, born in 1740, who herself lived to a considerable age, passing in 1826.

Lettice's days closed in Scarborough, in Cumberland County, Maine, in the year 1827. Scarborough was then a settled coastal community of farms, marshes, and fisheries along the southern Maine shore, a place where families of British Isles descent had taken root through several generations. Should the recorded dates stand as written, Lettice's life spanned an extraordinary one hundred and seventeen years, reaching from the reign of Queen Anne to the presidency of John Quincy Adams — a remarkable span, even allowing for the uncertainties common to early genealogical records of birth in the old country.

Lettice Hasty was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.