Alexander Thompson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alexander Thompson (1650–1695), an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Ipswich, Massachusetts, his marriage to Mary Deliverance Haggett, his daughter Sarah, and the colonial New England context of his life. Notable: late-17th-century Essex County setting, the same county and era as the Salem witch trials.

Alexander Thompson (1650–1695) lived the whole of his recorded life within the bounds of Ipswich, Essex County, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1650 and where he died on the seventeenth day of December, 1695, at the age of forty-five. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an eleven-times great-grandfather, one of the earliest New England forebears preserved in this register.

Ipswich in the latter half of the seventeenth century was a settled and prosperous coastal town of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1634 and known in that era for its fertile farmland, its shipping, and the strict Congregational character of its meetinghouse society. Essex County in these decades was also the stage upon which the Salem witch trials unfolded in 1692, a convulsion of religious anxiety that touched many neighboring families during the closing years of Alexander's life. Whether he or his household were drawn into those events is not recorded in the family papers; he lived through that fraught season and died some three years after its conclusion.

Alexander was joined in marriage to Mary Deliverance Haggett, whose surname after marriage appears in the records as Thompson. The pairing of a given name such as "Deliverance" was characteristic of Puritan New England, where virtues and providences were often borne as Christian names. Of their union, the register preserves the name of one daughter, Sarah Thompson, born in 1671 and afterward married into the Ingalls family; she lived until 1724 and carried the line forward.

Alexander's death at midwinter, in the parish of his birth, closes a life lived entirely within the first generations of English settlement upon the Essex shore. He was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.