Robert Burnell

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Robert Burnell (1690–1744), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Massachusetts, marriage to Patience Mills, his daughter Mary Burnell, his death in coastal Maine, and the broader context of New England frontier life in the early eighteenth century.

Robert Burnell (1690–1744) entered the world on the fifteenth of February, 1690, in the town of Lynn in Essex County, Massachusetts — a settlement that by the close of the seventeenth century had grown into one of the more established communities along the North Shore of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His birth fell in a period of considerable upheaval in the region: the colonial charter had recently been revoked and restored, and Essex County itself stood on the eve of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, events that would shake every village within riding distance of Lynn during Robert's earliest years.

In time Robert took as his wife Patience Mills, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Mary Burnell, born in 1716. Mary would live until 1771 and carries the line forward into the compiler's paternal-grandmother branch.

At some point in his life Robert removed northward from Massachusetts into what was then the District of Maine, settling in Falmouth in Cumberland County — a coastal community on Casco Bay that, in the first half of the eighteenth century, marked something of a northern frontier of English settlement. Falmouth in that era was a place of fisheries, modest shipping, and timber, and a place repeatedly menaced by the frontier conflicts that flared between the English colonies, the French in Acadia, and the native peoples of the region. It was there in Falmouth that Robert ended his days on the twenty-eighth of March, 1744, at the age of fifty-four.

Robert Burnell stands among the deeper colonial-era forebears preserved in this register. Through his daughter Mary, his line passes downward across many generations of New England and ultimately into the Hyten record. Robert was the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal-grandmother line.