Thomas Henry Robertson Bird

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Henry Robertson Bird (1640–1709), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Dorchester, Massachusetts, his place within colonial New England, his daughter Mary Bird, and the era context of 17th-century Puritan Suffolk County. Notable: among the earliest American-born forebears in the compiler's documented lineage.

Thomas Henry Robertson Bird (1640–1709) stands among the earliest American-born forebears recorded in the Hyten family archive. He was born on the 4th of May, 1640, in Dorchester, then within Suffolk County in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he died in that same town on the 30th of January, 1709, having lived the whole arc of his sixty-eight years within its bounds.

Dorchester in the seventeenth century was one of the oldest English settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by Puritan emigrants from the West Country of England. By the year of Thomas's birth, the town was a settled agricultural community of meetinghouse, common pasture, and tidal mill, organized under the strict ecclesiastical discipline that governed all of Bay Colony life. To be born in Dorchester in 1640 was to enter the second generation of New England — children raised not by emigrants from the old country but by parents already accustomed to the rigors of the American shore. The decades that bracketed his life saw the colony pass through the upheavals of King Philip's War in the 1670s, the loss and restoration of the colonial charter, and at the close of his middle years the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the shadow of which fell upon many a Suffolk and Essex County household.

The archive preserves the record of one child of Thomas: a daughter, Mary Bird, born in 1698, when her father was already in his late fifties, and who lived until 1738. It is through Mary that the line descends into the compiler's paternal-grandmother branch, threading forward through generations of New England and, in time, westward-moving kin.

Thomas Henry Robertson Bird was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.