Mary Bird

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Bird (1698–1738), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Dorchester, Massachusetts, her parentage, the son she bore, and the colonial New England context of her lifetime in early eighteenth-century Suffolk County.

Mary Bird was born on the 21st day of August in the year 1698, in the town of Dorchester, Suffolk County, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She was the daughter of Thomas Henry Robertson Bird (1640–1709), and entered the world in the closing years of the seventeenth century, a period during which colonial New England remained a tightly knit Puritan society still reckoning with the recent upheavals at Salem and the broader anxieties of frontier life under English colonial rule.

Dorchester, the place of Mary's birth, was among the oldest of the Massachusetts Bay settlements, founded in 1630 and known for its agricultural lands, its meetinghouse traditions, and its proximity to the harbor town of Boston. To be born into Dorchester at the close of the 1690s was to be raised within an established Congregational community, surrounded by the rhythms of planting, town meeting, and the Sabbath. Mary's father, Thomas, would live until 1709, meaning Mary lost him in her eleventh year.

Of Mary's life in adulthood, the family records preserve the birth of her son, Jonathan Kelton, born in 1730, who would go on to live a long life until 1804 and through whom the line descends. Mary's own years, however, proved comparatively brief. She died on Christmas Day, the 25th of December, 1738, in the same Dorchester of her birth, having lived but forty years. In that era, mortality among women in early middle age remained common, and many New England households knew the early loss of mothers.

Mary Bird thus represents one of the deepest colonial-Massachusetts roots of the family tree. She was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.