Peter Bent

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Peter Bent (1703–1798), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Sudbury, his long life across nearly a century in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, his marriage to Mary Parris, and his daughter Katherine Bent. Notable: span across colonial and early Republic eras; Parris marital connection.

Peter Bent (1703–1798) was born on the seventeenth of May, 1703, in Sudbury, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the colonial province then under the Crown. His life, stretching nearly ninety-five years, traced an extraordinary arc across the eighteenth century — from the early colonial settlements of New England, through the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution, and at last into the first decade of the American Republic. Few of his contemporaries lived to witness so wide a sweep of history upon the same Massachusetts soil.

Middlesex County in Peter's youth remained a region of farming villages bound closely to the meetinghouse, where families such as the Bents had been settled since the earliest generations of Puritan migration. Sudbury and the neighboring towns supplied much of the militia and yeomanry of central Massachusetts, and the surnames of these communities recur often in the genealogies of New England.

Peter was joined in marriage to Mary Parris, whose surname carries weight in the annals of colonial Massachusetts and is associated with families touched by the events at Salem Village in 1692, within living memory of Peter's own birth. Of this union the records preserve a daughter, Katherine Bent, born in 1736 and living until 1818 — herself a witness to the founding of the nation through which her parents lived.

Peter passed his later years in Marlborough, in the same county where he had been born, and died there on the eleventh of March, 1798. He was laid to rest in the soil of Middlesex County after a lifetime such as few were granted in that age, when childhood mortality was high and adult longevity uncertain. His nearly ten decades made him a living bridge between the second generation of Massachusetts settlement and the early years of the United States.

Peter was the compiler's eighth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.