Margaret Hayward

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Hayward (1608–1670), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her English birth in Bristol, transatlantic relocation to colonial Maine, marriage to John Browne of New Harbor, her daughter Emma, and the broader era context of early 17th-century English emigration to the northeastern frontier of New England.

Margaret Hayward was born in December of 1608 in the port city of Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, and departed this life on the 26th of May, 1670, at New Harbor in Lincoln County, on the coast of what is now Maine. Her life thus spanned the better part of the seventeenth century, a tumultuous period encompassing the reign of James I, the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration — events that shaped the patterns of English emigration to the New World during her adult years.

Bristol in the early seventeenth century was among the busiest ports in England, a hub of Atlantic commerce and a common point of departure for those bound for the American colonies. It was from this maritime world that Margaret was carried into the fellowship of the New England frontier. She became the wife of John Browne, remembered in family tradition as John "of New Harbor," the eighth great-grandfather of the compiler in his own line. The settlement of New Harbor, situated upon the rocky and storm-beaten coast of the Pemaquid region of Maine, was in those years a precarious outpost of English fishing and trading interests, far removed from the more populous colonies to the south.

Of Margaret's union with John Browne, the family records preserve the name of a daughter, Emma — affectionately called "Emmy" — born in 1644 and surviving until 1697. Through Emma's descendants the line continued forward across the generations of colonial New England and onward into the family whose history is here recorded.

Margaret died at New Harbor in the spring of 1670, having lived to the age of sixty-one years, a notable span for a woman of the colonial frontier. Her resting place lies in the same wild coastal country in which she had made her colonial home. Margaret Hayward stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as an eleven-times great-grandmother.