Daniel Nathaniel Needham

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel Nathaniel Needham (1638–1717), a 10× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in colonial Lynn, Massachusetts, his parents John Edmund Needham and Joan Leazing, his marriage to Ruth Chadwell, and his son Ezekiel. Notable: early Essex County, Massachusetts Bay Colony settler whose lifetime spanned the Salem witch trials era.

Daniel Nathaniel Needham (1638–1717) was born on the eleventh of November, 1638, in Lynn, Essex County, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and there, nearly seventy-nine years later, he closed his earthly days on the fifth of November, 1717. The whole compass of his long life thus rested within the bounds of a single New England town — a remarkable constancy of place in an age when many of his neighbors removed inland or northward to fresh frontiers.

He was the son of John Edmund Needham, who departed this life in 1677, and of Joan (also rendered Joane or Jone) Leazing or Leasing (1610–1674), placing Daniel firmly among the second generation born upon American soil. The Essex County of his youth was a settlement still raw with first-growth timber and Puritan discipline, governed by the meetinghouse and the magistrate alike. By the time of his middle years, that same county would become the stage upon which the Salem witch trials of 1692 unfolded — events that shook every household within riding distance of the courthouse, Lynn included, though no particular involvement of Daniel in those proceedings is recorded in this archive.

Daniel was joined in marriage to Ruth Chadwell, who thereafter bore the Needham name. From their union the family register preserves the name of one son, Ezekiel Needham, born in 1670 and surviving his father by some eighteen years, until his own death in 1735. Through Ezekiel, the Needham line was carried forward into the eighteenth century and, in due season, into the broader stream of descent that this archive endeavors to trace.

Daniel's long residence in Lynn, his English-rooted parentage, and his place in the second American-born generation render him a characteristic figure of colonial Essex County: a man whose life bridged the founding years of the Bay Colony and the dawning of its provincial era.

Daniel Nathaniel Needham was the compiler's tenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.