Elizabeth Knight Bacon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Knight Bacon (1656–1713), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Charlestown, Massachusetts; her marriage to Jacob Bacon; her daughter Elizabeth Bacon; her death in Roxbury; and historical context of late 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, including the era of the Salem witch trials.

Elizabeth Knight Bacon (1656–1713) was born on the third day of June 1656 in Charlestown, Suffolk County, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and died on the twenty-seventh of February 1713 in neighboring Roxbury, having lived her entire span of fifty-six years within the small cluster of Puritan settlements ringing Boston harbor. She occupies a place of considerable depth in the family register as a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler along the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.

The Charlestown of Elizabeth's birth was a settlement scarcely a generation removed from its founding, its meetinghouse and wharves still bearing the rough character of the first plantation period. Puritan Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century was a society organized around the gathered congregation, the town meeting, and the disciplined household; women of Elizabeth's station bore principal responsibility for the spiritual and material government of those households. Her lifespan further encompassed several of the most turbulent episodes of New England's colonial history, including King Philip's War in the 1670s, the revocation and restoration of the colonial charter in the 1680s, and the convulsions of the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Elizabeth was joined in marriage to Jacob Bacon, and of their union the register preserves the name of one daughter, Elizabeth Bacon, born in 1692 and living until 1737. The shared given name, passed from mother to daughter, was a common practice among English families of the period and served to mark continuity of household and lineage. The younger Elizabeth would carry the Bacon line forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the descent that flows down to the compiler's own generation.

Elizabeth Knight Bacon's death at Roxbury in 1713 placed her among the last of the founding-era generation in that town, her life having bridged the early Puritan commonwealth and the more settled provincial society that followed. She stands in the family record as a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.