Joseph Brookings

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Joseph Brookings (1720–1823), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial York, Maine, his marriage to Sophia Ann Tappan, his daughter Eleanor, his death at Woolwich in 1823, and the historical context of the District of Maine across the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national eras. Notable: extraordinary recorded lifespan of 102 years.

Joseph Brookings (1720–1823) was a son of the District of Maine whose recorded lifespan of one hundred and two years made him one of the longest-lived ancestors preserved in this register. He was born on the first day of November, 1720, at York, in York County, Maine, then a frontier settlement on the northern edge of the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction. York in the early eighteenth century was a coastal community still within living memory of the devastating Candlemas Raid of 1692, and its inhabitants knew well the rhythms of fishing, timber, and intermittent conflict with French and Wabanaki neighbors to the north and east.

Joseph in due course took to wife Sophia Ann Tappan, of the Tappan family (a surname also rendered Toppan in the older New England records, with the two forms used interchangeably across colonial registers). Of their issue, the present archive records a daughter, Eleanor — also called Ellen — Brookings, born in 1743 and surviving until 1810. Through this daughter the Brookings blood descended into the compiler's paternal-grandmother line.

The span of Joseph's years was remarkable. Born under the reign of George I, he lived through the founding of Georgia, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the framing of the federal Constitution, the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and into the early years of John Quincy Adams's political ascendancy. Maine itself, long a district of Massachusetts, achieved separate statehood in 1820 under the Missouri Compromise, an event Joseph witnessed in his hundredth year.

He died on the fifteenth of April, 1823, at Woolwich, in Sagadahoc County, Maine, a town set upon the eastern bank of the Kennebec River opposite Bath. Joseph Brookings stands in the family record as an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.