John "of New Harbor" 8th gf Browne

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Browne 'of New Harbor' (1603–1670), an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth in Bristol, his emigration-era settlement at Damariscotta in the Maine frontier, his marriage to Margaret Hayward, and his daughter Emma. Notable: among the earliest English settlers of the Pemaquid region of colonial Maine.

John Browne, known in family memory as 'John of New Harbor,' was born on the twelfth day of April in the year 1603, in the parish of St. Thomas in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. The Bristol of his birth was among the foremost ports of the English realm, a city whose quays bustled with merchant vessels bound for the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and the slowly opening shores of North America. From such a maritime cradle came many of the early adventurers and planters who carried English settlement westward across the Atlantic.

In the course of his life John crossed that ocean and made his home in the rugged coastal country of what is now Lincoln County, Maine, settling at Damariscotta near the inlet known as New Harbor — the appellation by which he has long been distinguished in family records. The Pemaquid region in the middle decades of the seventeenth century was a remote and contested frontier, lightly governed, sparsely populated by English fishermen, traders, and planters, and shared uneasily with the native Wabanaki peoples and rival French interests to the north and east. To plant a household on that shore in such an age required uncommon hardihood.

John was united in marriage to Margaret Hayward, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Emma — affectionately remembered as 'Emmy' — born in 1644 and surviving until 1697. Through her the Browne blood was carried forward into succeeding generations of the compiler's maternal ancestry on the paternal-grandmother branch.

John Browne died in the year 1670 at Damariscotta, in the country he had helped to settle, having lived sixty-seven years that spanned the reigns of three English monarchs and the founding of the New England colonies.

John was the compiler's eleventh great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.