Nicholas Maine Denning

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nicholas Maine Denning (1645–1725), a 10× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maine, his death in Gloucester, Massachusetts, his marriage to Emma Brown, and his daughter Eme Denning. Era context touches the founding generation of coastal New England in the late seventeenth century.

Nicholas Maine Denning (1645–1725) stood among the earliest forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, occupying the position of a tenth great-grandparent and thus one of the deepest verifiable roots in the family tree. He was born in 1645 in Bristol, in the county of Lincoln, on the rugged coast of what would later be organized as the District and then the State of Maine. At the time of his birth, the settlements along the Maine shore were small, isolated fishing and trading outposts, vulnerable to the pressures of weather, scarcity, and the shifting boundaries between English colonial claims and the territories of the indigenous peoples of the region. To be born in Bristol in 1645 was to enter a frontier world held together by kinship, congregational worship, and the sea.

In the course of his life he was united in marriage to Emma Brown, known familiarly as Emmy, with whom he established a household and to whom the family register attributes the birth of a daughter, Emornem Denning, called Eme, born in 1677 and surviving until 1714. Whether other children were born to this union is not preserved in the present record, and the archive sets down only this single named child.

Nicholas Denning lived to the considerable age of eighty years, a remarkable span for a man of the seventeenth-century colonies, where infant mortality, epidemic disease, and the hardships of frontier life cut many lives short. He died on the ninth of June, 1725, in Gloucester, in Essex County, Massachusetts — a fishing port on Cape Ann whose maritime character would have been familiar to a man whose earliest years had been shaped by the Maine coast. His removal southward to Gloucester reflects the steady migration of New England families along the shoreline in that century.

Nicholas was the compiler's tenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.