Patience Mills

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Patience Mills (1685–1744), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, her marriage to Robert Burnell, her daughter Mary Burnell, her death in coastal Maine, and the broader era context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England.

Patience Mills was born in 1685 in Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts, a coastal town then numbered among the older settlements of the Bay Colony. Her birth fell only a few years before the upheavals that would mark the close of the seventeenth century in Essex County, an era in which the towns of Lynn, Salem, and their neighbors were closely bound by trade, kinship, and Puritan congregational life. Children of her generation came of age in the shadow of those events and amid the steady northward migration of New England families seeking land along the frontiers of Maine and New Hampshire.

In the course of her life Patience was joined in marriage to Robert Burnell, and from that union the family record preserves a daughter, Mary Burnell, born in 1716 and living until 1771. Through Mary the line descended onward into the generations from which the compiler is drawn, carrying forward the Mills and Burnell names into later New England households.

Patience's later years were spent at the northeastern reaches of the English settlements, for she died on the 28th of March, 1744, at North Yarmouth in Cumberland County, in what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. North Yarmouth in that period was a modest coastal town, repeatedly resettled after the disruptions of the colonial wars with the French and the Wabanaki peoples, and its families lived close to the rhythms of the sea and the timber trade. That Patience died there, far from her birthplace at Lynn, reflects the broader pattern by which Massachusetts families of her era extended themselves into the Maine frontier across the course of a single lifetime.

Patience Mills stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother (PM) line as an 8× great-grandmother, one of the early New England forebears from whom that branch of the family descends.