Margaret Breed

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Breed (1615–1658), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Lynn, Massachusetts, her marriage to Thomas Chadwell, her daughter Ruth, and historical context of early colonial Essex County. Notable: she belonged to the founding English settler generation of Lynn, Massachusetts.

Margaret Breed (1615–1658) stands among the earliest colonial forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, numbered an eleven-times great-grandmother. Both the beginning and the end of her life were rooted in Lynn, in Essex County, Massachusetts — a town settled in the 1620s and 1630s by English Puritans drawn to the shoreline north of Boston Bay. Born in 1615 in Lynn, Margaret was a member of that founding generation whose families converted marshland and forest into farms, tanyards, and the modest meeting-house communities that would shape New England for centuries.

The Essex County of Margaret's lifetime was a place of intense religious conviction and disciplined community order. Lynn itself, originally called Saugus, grew up around farming, fishing, and the early ironworks established in the 1640s — one of the first industrial enterprises in English North America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony into which Margaret came of age was barely a generation old, governed under Puritan covenant and only loosely tethered to the distant Crown.

Margaret married Thomas Chadwell, and from their union descended at least one recorded daughter, Ruth Chadwell, born in 1640. Ruth would in time marry into the Needham family and live until 1719, carrying her mother's line forward into the eighteenth century and, eventually, southward and westward through the generations that would culminate in the compiler's own Hyten ancestry. It was through Ruth that Margaret's name endured in the family record.

Margaret died on the 28th of September, 1658, in the same town of Lynn where she had been born forty-three years earlier — a life lived entirely within the bounds of one young coastal settlement, yet one whose descendants would scatter across the continent. Her death preceded by more than three decades the witchcraft trials that would later trouble nearby Salem, but she belonged unmistakably to the founding stock of Essex County. Margaret was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.