Ruth Chadwell - Needham

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ruth Chadwell-Needham (1640–1719), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Lynn, Massachusetts, her parents Thomas Chadwell and Margaret Breed, her marriage to Daniel Nathaniel Needham, and her son Ezekiel. Notable: early colonial Essex County, Massachusetts roots predating the Salem witch trials era.

Ruth Chadwell-Needham (1640–1719) was born in Lynn, in Essex County, Massachusetts, during the first generation of English settlement along the North Shore. She was the daughter of Thomas Chadwell (1611–1683) and Margaret Breed (1615–1658), families whose names became deeply woven into the civic and ecclesiastical fabric of colonial Lynn. Born only two decades after the landing at Plymouth, Ruth came of age in a Puritan town still very much shaped by its founding covenant, its Congregational meetinghouse, and the steady industries of tanning, shoemaking, and ironworking for which Lynn would become known.

The Essex County of Ruth's lifetime was a closely bound world of intermarrying English families, and the surrounding decades brought the great trials of the colony: King Philip's War in the 1670s, the upheavals of the Andros administration, and — within her own neighborhood — the Salem witchcraft proceedings of 1692, which touched Lynn and the surrounding towns profoundly. Ruth lived through the whole of that turbulent era, residing in Lynn from her birth to her death.

She married Daniel Nathaniel Needham, joining the Chadwell line to the Needham family, another household established in colonial Essex County. Of their issue, the record preserves a son, Ezekiel Needham (1670–1735), through whom the line carried forward into the eighteenth century.

Ruth's mother Margaret Breed died in 1658, when Ruth was a young woman of about eighteen; her father Thomas survived until 1683. Ruth herself lived to the considerable age of seventy-nine, dying in Lynn on 20 July 1719, having witnessed nearly the entire seventeenth-century chapter of Massachusetts Bay's history — from its early Puritan settlement to the dawn of the provincial era under the new royal charter.

Ruth was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.