Mehitable Colcord

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mehitable Colcord (1652–1758), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial New Hampshire, her marriage to Nathaniel Stevens, her son Nathaniel Stevens, her remarkable longevity, and broader era context regarding seventeenth-century coastal New England settlement.

Mehitable Colcord (1652–1758) was born in Hampton, in what was then the colonial province of New Hampshire, within the bounds of present-day Rockingham County. She lived a life of remarkable span, passing at last in Dover, Strafford County, New Hampshire, at the recorded age of one hundred and six. Even allowing for the imprecisions common to seventeenth-century records, her longevity stands as an extraordinary fact within the family register.

Hampton, where Mehitable entered the world, had been settled only about a decade and a half before her birth, founded in 1638 as one of the four original townships of the New Hampshire seacoast. The community in which she came of age was a Puritan one, closely tied to the Massachusetts Bay tradition, ordered around the meetinghouse and the cultivation of marsh hay and salt meadows that distinguished the Hampton lands. Dover, where she would later spend her final years and ultimately die, was likewise among the earliest English settlements on the Piscataqua, with its own long history of fishing, trade, and intermittent frontier conflict during the Indian wars that shadowed colonial New Hampshire through much of her lifetime.

Mehitable was united in marriage to Nathaniel Stevens. Of this union, the family record preserves the name of their son, Nathaniel Stevens (1670–1741), who carried forward both his father's name and the family's New Hampshire roots into the eighteenth century. Through this son the line continued downward through generations that would eventually pass into the compiler's own ancestry.

The span of Mehitable's life is itself a kind of historical witness. Born under the early Commonwealth in England's reckoning, she lived through the reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and the first two Georges, and saw colonial New England transformed from a frontier outpost into a settled provincial society. Mehitable Colcord was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.