Jacob Bacon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jacob Bacon (1654–1709), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Newton, Massachusetts, his marriage to Elizabeth Knight, his daughter Elizabeth Bacon, and colonial Massachusetts Bay context. Notable: lifelong residence in a single Middlesex County town spanning the late Puritan era.

Jacob Bacon (1654–1709) belonged to the early colonial generations of the Hyten family's deep New England roots, standing as a nine-times great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line. He was born on the second day of April in the year 1654 in Newton, Middlesex County, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he closed his life in that same town on the fifth of June, 1709, having spent his fifty-five years within the bounds of a single Middlesex community.

The Newton of Jacob's birth was a young settlement, still known in those early decades as Cambridge Village, lying along the Charles River and only gradually pulling itself apart from the older town of Cambridge. Massachusetts in this period remained a Puritan commonwealth, governed under the original colonial charter until its revocation in 1684, and Jacob's adult years coincided with the upheavals of King Philip's War, the loss and restoration of provincial government, the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1692, and the long French and Indian conflicts at the close of the seventeenth century. To live one's entire span in Newton through such years was to witness the maturing of New England from frontier village to established province.

Jacob married Elizabeth Knight, who took his surname as Elizabeth Knight Bacon. From this union the family records preserve a daughter, Elizabeth Bacon, born in 1692 and living until 1737. Through this daughter the Bacon line of Newton passed forward into the generations that would, after many removes and migrations, eventually flow into the Hyten family.

No occupation, civic office, or personal correspondence concerning Jacob has been entered into the present register; what endures is the simple shape of his life — born, married, fathered, and buried in Newton — a quiet permanence characteristic of many seventeenth-century Massachusetts householders. Jacob was the compiler's nine-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.