Sarah Hannah Fellows

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Hannah Fellows (1704–1765), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Hampton, New Hampshire, her marriage to Samuel Ingalls, her daughter Ruth Ingalls, her death in Newmarket, and the colonial New Hampshire context of her life.

Sarah Hannah Fellows was born on the 9th of April, 1704, in the coastal town of Hampton, Rockingham County, in the Province of New Hampshire. Her life unfolded entirely within the bounds of that province, then a comparatively small English colony of saltmarsh farms, fishing villages, and timber lots set between the Merrimack and the Piscataqua. Hampton at the time of her birth was one of the older settled towns of New Hampshire, having been founded in 1638, and remained a community closely tied to its Puritan congregational roots and to the rhythms of agriculture and the Atlantic coast.

Sarah came of age in an era when the northern New England frontier was repeatedly disturbed by the imperial conflicts between Britain and France, and when daily life in Rockingham County was shaped by the meetinghouse, the family farm, and the season. In due course she was united in marriage to Samuel Ingalls, joining her household to one of the Ingalls lines then established in the region. Of this union the family register records a daughter, Ruth Ingalls, born in 1719 and herself destined for a brief life, dying in 1754 at the age of about thirty-five. Through this daughter the line continued forward into the generations from which the compiler's own paternal-grandmother branch would eventually descend.

Sarah lived to see the middle of the eighteenth century and the unsettled years preceding the great imperial reordering of North America. She died in 1765 in Newmarket, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, a town set inland along the Lamprey River not far from her birthplace, having passed her sixty-first year. Her entire recorded life was thus contained within a small compass of New Hampshire towns, a quiet but enduring presence in the colonial generations of the family.

Sarah was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.