Story Arcs

Salem and the wider compass of Essex County, Massachusetts, stand among the earliest English footholds in the New World, settled in the 1620s upon the rocky coastline north of Boston Bay. By the middle of the seventeenth century, when our family lines first take root there, the county had become a thriving Puritan commonwealth of fishing harbors, salt marshes, and pioneer farmsteads, knit together by the towns of Salem, Lynn, Ipswich, Rowley, Wenham, and Gloucester. It was a society at once devout and contentious — a place of meeting-houses and town covenants, of cod fleets returning to wharves, and, in its darkest chapter, of the witchcraft trials of 1692 that would forever mark the name of Salem in the American memory.

Into this country came Thomas Chadwell (1611–1683), born in the Cotswolds of Gloucestershire, and Joan Leazing (1610–1674), born in Hampstead near London — both crossing in the great Puritan migration and settling at Lynn, where they would live out their long days. Alongside them appears John Foster (1616–1688), an Edlesborough man of Buckinghamshire origin who made his home in Salem itself until his death. Margaret Breed (1615–1658), born at Lynn, represents the first generation of the family native to American soil.

The next cohort, raised under the rooftrees of these immigrants, were thoroughly Essex-bred. Daniel Nathaniel Needham (1638–1717) and his wife Ruth Chadwell (1640–1719) were born at Lynn, as was their son Ezekiel Needham (1670–1735). Mary Deliverance Haggett (1643–1725) entered the world at Wenham, Lydia Burbank (1644–1692) at Rowley, and Nathaniel Stevens (1645–1718) at Salisbury near the Merrimack. Benjamin Bray Wilkins (1652–1717), born in Salem itself, would in time remove to Middleton. Along the northern coast at Gloucester gathered Nicholas Maine Denning (1645–1725), Emma Brown (1644–1697), their daughter Emornem "Eme" Denning (1677–1714), and Eleazer Elwell (1673–1714), while Alexander Thompson (1650–1695) and his daughter Sarah Thompson Ingalls (1671–1724) lived at Ipswich.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, the rising generation — Silvanus Wentworth (1659–1689), the younger Nathaniel Stevens (1670–1741), Ebenezer Foster (1677–1718) — had begun to drift outward, toward Dover and Stratham in New Hampshire, toward Wrentham, Windham, and inland Massachusetts. Essex County was thus the cradle from which the family fanned across New England, a hearth whose embers warmed nearly every branch that followed.

Hendricks County, carved from the central Indiana wilderness in 1824 and named for Governor William Hendricks, lay upon the gently rolling prairie just west of Indianapolis. Its seat at Danville and the smaller village of Brownsburg rose during the great westward push of the 1820s and 1830s, when hardwood forests were felled into farmsteads and Methodist and Baptist circuit riders bound the scattered settlements into a working frontier society. For more than a century thereafter, the county was a place of mills, meeting-houses, and modest agricultural prosperity — and, for several lines of the Hyten kindred, the final resting ground of a generation born in the older colonies.

The earliest of the family to close his days in this Indiana soil was JAMES Thaddeus Nichols (1762–1824), a Pennsylvanian by birth whose death coincided almost exactly with the county's formal organization. Close upon him came the Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall (1765–1846), a Marylander of Prince George's County stock who carried his ministry westward to Danville, where he died in the prime of the county's settlement era. His daughter, Elizabeth "Eliza" Darnall (1802–1876), born in Kentucky, lived out her long widowhood in Center Township and was laid to rest in Hendricks soil.

The migration of older Pennsylvanians continued with RACHEL Sargent Jackson (1774–1856) and William A. Hawkins (1779–1851), both born in that commonwealth, and with Sarah Turpin (1777–1854), a Kentuckian by birth. Each came to rest in Hendricks County during the antebellum decades, when the community was knitting itself together through churches, county roads, and the courthouse square at Danville.

It was here also that William Caywood Hyten (1790–1882), born near Hagerstown, Maryland, lived out his remarkable ninety-two years, dying at Danville in the closing years of the Reconstruction era. His near contemporary MARGARET B. "Peggy" Lois Johnson (1796–1856), born in Chatham, North Carolina, likewise ended her days in the county.

By the second generation, Hendricks County had become not merely a destination but a birthplace. Jerimiah Nicholas Stutsman (1830–1901) was native-born of its soil, as was his daughter Mary Alice Stutsman (1858–1931), who died at Brownsburg. Isabella A. Foster (1839–1918), New York by birth, joined them in Brownsburg in her later years.

Hendricks County thus stands in the broader family narrative as the meeting-ground of the eastern seaboard lines — Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky — where, in a single Indiana county, the dispersed colonial branches converged, intermarried, and at length yielded a generation that called the Hoosier prairie its native home.

The Maryland Tidewater, that broad apron of estuaries, tobacco creeks, and salt-marsh peninsulas where the Patuxent and Potomac empty into the Chesapeake, served as one of the principal seventeenth-century thresholds through which the family entered the New World. Chartered to the Calverts in 1632 and seated first at St. Mary's City, the colony offered religious latitude, fertile river-bottom land, and a headright system that drew English yeomen, planters, and indentured servants in considerable number. Charles, Calvert, St. Mary's, Prince George's, and Baltimore counties — names that recur throughout the family's records — were carved from the Tidewater wilderness as parishes and tobacco hundreds multiplied.

Among the earliest of our forebears to find a grave in Maryland soil were Eleanor Knight of Ackworth Cawood (1609–1675), a daughter of Bedfordshire, and John Smallwood (1610–1667), born in Middlewich, Cheshire, who died in Charles County after a lifetime spent in the colony's formative decades. Close upon them came Richard Edward Hicks (1617–1660), a Devonshire man whose life ended on the banks of the Patuxent in Calvert County, and John Scott Lynn Cox (1625–1700) of Sussex, long settled in St. Mary's County. Robert Love (1628–1675), a Northamptonshire emigrant, died at Baltimore in the same generation that saw Dr. Stephen C. Cawood (1630–1676), of Pontefract in Yorkshire, settle and die in Charles County. With them were the gentlewomen Angelina Wilson (1630–1710), Jane Widdrington (1630–1681) of Calvert County, and Anne E. Terrett (1633–1695) of Lancashire, whose passage from English shires to Maryland plantations exemplifies the era.

By mid-century the family had begun to take root in colonial soil itself. Sarah Bond (1633–1692) was born in Baltimore County, as was William Hunter Wilkinson (1648–1718); James Matthew Smallwood (1639–1714), son of the Cheshire-born John, lived out his days in Prince George's County. John Warnell (1630–1725) and his daughter Katherine Warnell (1645–1745) anchored a Baltimore line, while Elizabeth Hussey (1645–1747) was born and buried within Port Tobacco Parish of Charles County, her life spanning the colony's transition from frontier to settled gentry society.

The Tidewater thus stands as the family's great colonial cradle. From its tobacco wharves and parish churches, descendants would later press westward into the Piedmont and southward into the Carolinas, but here, between the Patuxent and the Chesapeake, the English ancestry first became American.

Washington County, set upon the easternmost reach of the District of Maine where the cold Atlantic breaks against rocky headlands and the tidal rivers of Machias, Pleasant, and Chandler wind inland through stands of spruce and white pine, became in the later eighteenth century a frontier of timber, salt fish, and shipbuilding. Carved from Lincoln County in 1789 and named for the first president, the region drew hardy settlers from older Maine towns and the seaports of Massachusetts Bay, who came seeking lumber lots, mill privileges, and the freedom of a coast still thinly peopled. Here, in Machias, Addison, Jonesboro, Jonesport, Columbia, and Cutler, the Hyten forebears established a maritime and lumbering community whose character was shaped equally by the sea and by the long, dark winters of the Down East shore.

The earliest of the family's lines to settle in this county were those who removed northeastward from Kittery, Eliot, and Scarborough. Major Josiah Libby (1716–1786) and his wife Mary Stone (1722–1786), both natives of the older York settlements, ended their days in Machias, having helped to anchor the family upon that frontier. They were joined in the same generation by Captain Francis Miller (1733–1800), a Middleboro mariner whose vocation suited him admirably to the seafaring port, and by Bartholomew Bryant (1737–1832), Eleanor Brookings (1743–1810), and Sarah Molley Newell (1743–1860), whose long lives bridged the Revolutionary and early national eras. To the neighboring township of Addison came Samuel Knowles (1733–1797) of Provincetown, Edmund Stevens (1738–1790) of Kittery, and Lydia Holbrook (1742–1775), forming a small but resolute company of pioneers.

In Jonesboro and its environs settled a second cohort drawn from yet more distant origins: James Smith (b. 1740) and his son James "Francie" Smith (1760–1829), both born in Scotland and the Orkneys; Stephen Otis Johnson (1762–1817), born in Nottingham, England; and Reuben Libby (1745–1833) with his wife Rebecca Weston (1745–1819), whose deaths in Jonesborough closed a journey begun in the Cumberland County settlements. Mary Parris Russell (1763–1835) and Benjamin Kelton (1765–1852) carried the Massachusetts inland strain to the same town, while Governor William Ingersoll (1754–1807) of Gloucester ended his days in Columbia, and Patience Patricia Bryant Johnson (1765–1846) in Cutler.

Thus Washington County stands in the family chronicle as the great gathering ground of the late colonial and early federal generations — the eastern terminus of the long migration out of York and Cumberland, and the seedbed from which later descendants would, in their turn, set forth westward.

Yorkshire, the largest of England's historic counties, stretched from the rugged North Sea coast across the broad vales of York to the windswept dales of the western uplands. In the seventeenth century, when the family's documented presence there first emerged, Yorkshire was a country of market towns, ancient parishes, and yeoman freeholds, its rhythms shaped by the wool trade, by stone-walled sheep pastures, and by the steady tolling of cathedral bells at Bradford, York, and Pontefract. It was a county that sent many of its sons across the Atlantic during the colonial migrations, and the family's records bear witness to both those who stayed and those who departed.

The earliest documented kin in Yorkshire were George Haselock (1600–1663), born in the North Riding before his eventual passage to Rappahannock in Virginia, and his contemporary Michell Bramman (1600–1632), who lived and died upon Yorkshire soil. In the same generation, Stephen William Cawood (1606–1653) of Ackworth made his life in the West Riding parish of East Hardwick, and his son Dr. Stephen C. Cawood (1630–1676), born at Pontefract, would later carry the line to colonial Maryland. From the North Riding came also George Frances Haslock (1620–1663), who likewise crossed to Old Rappahannock County, Virginia.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century the family's center of gravity within Yorkshire shifted westward into the dale country, and chiefly to the parish of Dent, a remote stone-built community tucked among the high fells. There Alice Mason (b. 1652), Thomas Mason (1657–1743), and Sarah Mason (1667–1748) were born, the Mason name persisting through Margret Mason (1688–1764) and Anthony Mason (b. 1705). Alongside the Masons settled the Middletons: William Midleton (1667–1699), who departed for Boston in Massachusetts, his namesake William Midleton (1687–1769), who remained in Dent until his death, and George Middleton (1720–1792). Mary Stanes Fearnley (1661–1750) of Bradford married into this Dale community, ending her days at Sedbergh nearby, while Richard Hodgson (1664–1720) of Bradford and his descendant Alice Hodgson (1718–1814) joined the same dense web of intermarried Dent families, as did Agnes Dent (1710–1799), William Burton (1712–1789), and Catherine Sedgwick (1717–1794).

Yorkshire thus served the family both as cradle and as point of departure: a homeland of stone parishes and dale farms from which certain branches launched themselves toward Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts, while others remained rooted in Dent through five generations.

Dorset, that ancient maritime shire of south-western England, lies between the chalk downs and the Channel coast, its landscape stitched together by hedged lanes, sheep-walks, and stone-built villages whose names — Hilton, Cheselbourne, Ansty, Stoke Wake, Winterbourne Houghton — ring with the cadence of Saxon settlement. From the mid-seventeenth century to the closing decades of the Georgian age, this quiet pastoral country served as the cradle of several principal lines of the Hyten family, and the parish registers of its small downland churches faithfully recorded their christenings, marriages, and burials across nearly two centuries.

The earliest of the family known to this place was Richard James (1649–1685), born at Canterbury in Dorset, whose later voyage to Anne Arundel in the Maryland colony marked one of the family's first transatlantic departures. Closer to the heart of the Blackmore Vale, Stephen Allen (1672–1727) of Winterbourne Houghton wedded Elizabeth Phelps (1674–1746), and both lived out their days at Cheselbourne, a village whose modest agricultural rhythms governed the lives of their descendants for generations. In the neighbouring parish, John Hooper the Younger (1665–1753) of Hilton joined his fortunes to Ann Query (1675–1746) of Stoke Wake, establishing what would become the family's most enduring Dorset seat.

The eighteenth century saw the Hilton lines flourish. William Hooper (1710–1793), born at Ansty near Hilton, lived a long Georgian life of ninety-three years and died in the village of his birth. Elizabeth Allen (1703–1792), daughter of Stephen and Elizabeth, removed from Cheselbourne to Hilton upon marriage, drawing the Allen and Hooper households into one. Their son William Hooper (1738–1804) was christened at Hilton, while Susannah Mitchel (1740–1819) came from neighbouring Cheselbourne, the daughter of Thomas Mitchel (1710–1807), who himself ended his days far south at St George's Parish on the Isle of Portland. Further afield, William Toogood (1701–1760) was born at Sherborne and his daughter Anne Edith Toogood (1728–1784) at Leigh, dying at Warmwell — a reminder that the family's footprint reached across the breadth of the shire. Sarah Trask (1714–1750) came from West Knighton to be buried at Hilton, and John White (1733–1789) lived and died in that same parish.

By the close of the eighteenth century, however, the Dorset chapter began to draw toward its conclusion. William Grottley White (1760–1841) and Anne Hooper (1764–1839), both Hilton-born, removed northward into Wiltshire, dying at Marlborough. Their migration foreshadowed the wider Hyten dispersal — outward from the Dorset downs into Wiltshire, and, in time, across the seas to the New World.

Suffolk, that low and fertile shire of the English east, formed one of the earliest cradles of the family's documented existence. Bounded on the north by the Waveney and on the east by the German Sea, it was in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a country of wool and worsted, of market towns and ancient parishes, of timbered halls and reed-thatched cottages set among hedged fields. Its proximity to the ports of Yarmouth and Ipswich placed it within the orbit of Continental trade, while its inland villages — Yoxford, Sibton, Blundeston, Westhorpe, Homersfield — retained the quiet rhythms of agrarian England. It was here, in the generations preceding the Great Migration, that several of our oldest known ancestors lived, married, and were laid to rest.

Among the earliest recorded was John Joseph Clarke (d. 1610), born at Westhorpe and died at Blundeston with Flixton, a parish in the Waveney country near the Norfolk border. His kinswoman, or perhaps consort in the same circles, Lady Rose Alis Fenne (d. 1619), was likewise born in Suffolk and died at Blundeston, suggesting that the family's roots were anchored in the eastern parishes of the shire. Their daughter or successor in the line, Elizabeth Alice Clarke (d. 1630), born at Blundeston, eventually passed away across the county boundary at Great Yarmouth, indicating the easy traffic between Suffolk's villages and that bustling Norfolk port.

To the south, in the Suffolk Coastal District, the Goodwin and Barker families resided. Dorothy Chapman Barker (d. 1623) was born at Oxford and died at Sibton, an old monastic parish. Daniel G Goodwin (1600–1625), born at Yoxford, lived a brief life in his native shire before the line carried forward in his son, Daniel Goodwin (1620–1712), born in Suffolk but destined to die far across the Atlantic at Berwick, in the Province of Maine. From the western reaches of the county came the Wardes — Gilbert Warde and Marion Warde — both born at Homersfield in the Waveney District, the latter dying in distant Devonshire.

Suffolk thus stands at the headwaters of the family's recorded history: a quiet eastern shire from which, in the decades around 1630, members of these households joined the broader Puritan exodus to New England. The very name Suffolk would be carried across the sea and bestowed upon a Massachusetts county, where descendants of these Suffolk parishes would settle, prosper, and continue the line.

Among the steep alpine valleys of the Bernese Oberland and along the lake-shadowed villages of the Canton of Zurich, the Hyten family's deepest Swiss roots took hold. From the late sixteenth century through the opening decades of the eighteenth, three principal localities — Erlenbach in Zurich, Boltigen and Zweisimmen in the Bernese Simmental, and Zollikofen on the Aare just north of the city of Bern — gathered the threads of several allied lineages. These were generations who knew the rhythms of pasture and field, of village church and reformed catechism, and, for many, of the quiet defiance that came to be called Anabaptism. The era was one of religious tumult: the Swiss Confederacy bore witness to the persecutions of the Täufer, to the closing of borders, and at last to the great emigrations down the Rhine into the Palatinate and across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania.

The Stutzman line is the earliest to surface in the records. Johann Christen Stutzman (d. 1600) and Peter Von Stutzman (d. 1623), both straddling the border between the Palatinate and Erlenbach, established a presence carried forward by Hans Jacob Stutzman (d. 1642) and his son Hans Jacob Stutzmann (1625–1696), who lived and died in Erlenbach, Zurich. In the Simmental, meanwhile, the Betler and Zwahlen households flourished: Hans Bettler (d. 1617) and his wife Elsi Abbühl (d. 1617) of Boltigen, followed by Hans Moser Betler (d. 1644) and Madlena Zwahlen (d. 1666), joined to the Zweisimmen kindred of Anthony Zwahlen and Catharina Haehlen. Barbara Liechti (d. 1630) of Biglen and Elsbeth Aegelt of Hitterfinger added further Bernese threads.

In the canton of Bern proper, Johann Jacob Sebastian Müller (1626–1719) settled at Zollikofen, where his wife Salome Huber (1634–1692) had been born; their son, Johann Michael Mueller, tenth great-grandfather to later generations (1655–1695), was likewise born at Zollikofen before removing to Steinwenden in the Rhineland. His wife, Anna Loysa Regina (1658–1727), would in time cross the Atlantic and perish at sea.

The Swiss chapter closed with the generation of Madelena Mary Betler (1644–1727), born at Erlenbach, and Johann Jakob Stutzman (1675–1775), born in Erlenbach im Simmental, both of whom ended their lives far across the ocean — she upon the Atlantic itself, he at Montgomery Township in Pennsylvania. Thus Switzerland stands as the family's ancestral cradle, the highland source from which every later migration — into the Palatinate, down the Rhine, and at last to colonial America — was first drawn.

The Saarland, that wooded and river-cut country lying between the Moselle and the Rhine, and its near neighbor the German Palatinate, formed the cradle from which a considerable branch of the family issued. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the parishes of Fechingen and Bischmisheim — small villages clustered about the seat of Saarbrücken — bore the burdens common to the borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire: the devastations of the Thirty Years' War, the marauding armies of Louis XIV in the Palatine campaigns, and the slow Lutheran rebuilding which followed. It was in this contested ground, alternately reckoned German and French in later atlases, that the family struck its earliest documented roots.

The eldest of these were Peter Von Stutzman (d. 1623), whose origins lay between the Palatinate and the Swiss canton of Zurich, and Anna Maria Oehler (1613–1680), who passed her whole life in Fechingen, dying there as the war's long shadow at last receded. Her contemporary Hans Heinrich Wolf (1615–1677) was likewise of Fechingen, and from their union descended Johann Heinrich Wolff (1644–1691) and, in the following generation, Anna Eva Wolff (1676–1742), who carried the Fechingen line into the neighboring parish of Bischmisheim by marriage.

In Bischmisheim itself the Kuntz family took deep hold. Johann Nickel Kuntz (1625–1693) and his son Johan Kuntz (1652–1696) were among its earliest documented householders, joined in that village by Anna Maria Clara Klager (1636–1694), born at Saarbrücken, and by Heinrich Hauser (1633–1730), whose long life spanned nearly a century of Saar history from Hellenhausen to Burbach. His daughter ANNA Margaretha Hauser (1660–1739) wed into the Kuntz line, and through Johann Jacob Kuntz (1668–1701), Johann Georg Kuntz (1676–1763), and Johann Barthel Kuntz Sr (1680–1727), the family multiplied across the parish registers.

The eighteenth century brought both fresh blood and the first stirrings of departure. CHRISTINE Angelica Hotzel (1699–1769) came eastward from Walbach in Alsace to die at Bischmisheim, while Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon (1680–1756), Margaretha Elisabeth Gail Reger (1699–1763), and Johann Mathias Kuntz (1700–1771) anchored the village's middle generations. Yet the press of war, want, and confessional unease at length turned the family's gaze westward. CATHARINA Elisabetha Schwinger (1723–1754), born at Bischmisheim, died in Pennsylvania; and JOHANN Philip Kuntz (1726–1829), who crossed the Atlantic to Lehigh County, lived to the astonishing age of one hundred and three.

Thus Saarland, after five generations of cradling the line, became the threshold from which the family entered the New World.

Sudbury and the broader county of Middlesex, lying west of Boston along the gentle Sudbury and Concord rivers, served as one of the cradles of the family's New England story. Settled in the 1630s by Puritan emigrants pressing inland from the coast, these townships — Concord, Sudbury, Cambridge, Lexington, Newton, Marlborough, Reading, and later Carlisle — formed a constellation of meetinghouse villages, common fields, and mill brooks. Through nearly two centuries the family's roots wound deeply through this terrain, from the first generation of English settlers to the descendants who would later carry the name westward.

The earliest of the line to die upon Middlesex soil was Alice Brookman Mousall (1600–1657), born at Aldingbourne in West Sussex and laid to rest in Concord. She was followed shortly by Samuel Stratton (1625–1707), Kent-born, who likewise made his end at Concord, and by Peter Noyes (1630–1699) of Southampton, who became one of the patriarchs of Sudbury itself. Thomas Goble (1634–1690), English by birth, joined this founding cohort at Concord, while Elizabeth Darvill (1633–1739) — said to have reached the prodigious age of one hundred and six — both began and concluded her long life within Sudbury's bounds.

The second generation was wholly native to the county. Jacob Bacon (1654–1709) was born at Newton; the younger DA Samuel Stratton (1660–1726) and Ruth Goble (1663–1726) at Concord; Dorothy Noyes (1660–1719) at Sudbury. Rev. Samuel Parris (1653–1720), though London-born and tied to darker chapters in colonial memory, ended his days at Marlborough. John Parlin (1666–1750) and Mary Hartwell (1667–1738) anchored the family yet more firmly at Concord, where their son Capt. Jonathan Joseph Parlin (1698–1767) rose to military and civic standing in the colonial era.

The eighteenth century saw the family flourish across the Middlesex towns. Peter Bent (1703–1798), Mary Parris (1703–1803), DA Abigail Stratton (1705–1763), Samuel Russel (1712–1793) of Lexington, and Sarah Bryant (1722–1785) of Sudbury all belonged to this thriving network of cousins and meetinghouse neighbors. Lydia Dresser Holbrook (1720–1806), though Essex-born, died at Reading, drawn into the county's embrace by marriage.

With Katherine Bent (1736–1818), born at Sudbury but dying at Shrewsbury, Vermont, and with Sarah Bryant's removal to Otsego, New York, the long Middlesex chapter began to close. The county thus stands as the family's New England hearth — the soil from which later generations took fire and migrated north into Vermont and west into the New York frontier.

Kittery, planted upon the northern bank of the Piscataqua River where Maine meets the sea, was among the earliest English settlements upon that rugged coast, chartered in 1647 as the first town of the Province of Maine. Its character was shaped by the tides: shipyards rang along the river, sawmills harnessed the falls at Eliot and South Berwick upstream, and fishing shallops worked the islands at the river's mouth. It was a frontier of timber, salt, and contention, lying within the Massachusetts Bay Colony's uneasy reach and exposed, in its latter decades, to the depredations of the Indian wars that swept the eastern country.

To this rough province came Reginald Reynold Jenkins (1608–1683), born across the sea in Dartmouth, Devonshire, who took up lands in the Piscataqua country and ended his days at neighboring York. With him belonged Ann Gale (1615–1678), an immigrant out of Broomfield in Somerset, who died at Kittery; and George Rogers (1620–1655), of Bedfordshire birth, who closed his short life in the Eliot parish of the town. From their generation issued a vigorous native-born cohort: Richard Rogers (1643–1743), whose remarkable century of life spanned nearly the whole colonial era; Jabez H. Jenkins (1655–1697), born at Eliot and dying at Kittery in the midst of King William's War; and Margaret Chadbourne Spencer (1633–1670), kinswoman by distant degree to the later Spencers of England, born at South Berwick.

A second generation of Piscataqua-born children rooted the family yet more firmly to the soil. Hannah Anna Curtis (1665–1737), Alice Rogers (1671–1696), Eleanor Trickey (1660–1725), and Anne Fernald (1683–1730) all drew their first breath within the bounds of Kittery or its parishes. The mysterious Daniel Wadelstensteen (1643–1713), whose origin is recorded variously in the Netherlands and at South Berwick, lived and died upon the river. Margaret Felt (1632–1732), Sarah Libby (1653–1729), Patience Goodwin (1653–1716), and Esther Hanscom (1692–1761) connect the household to the wider eastern coast from Scarborough down to Berwick.

By the early eighteenth century, the family had begun its outward drift. Daniel John Stone (1689–1735), Sarah Jenkins (1689–1741), and Esther Hanscom all removed northward to Scarborough in Cumberland County, while Capt. Stephen Seavey (1690–1742) and Lydia Vaughan (1690–1765) came inward to settle. Kittery thus stands as the seedbed of the family's American beginning—the first New England harbor from which later generations dispersed along the Maine coast and into the inland provinces.

Montgomery County, situated upon the gently rolling prairies of west-central Indiana and watered by Sugar Creek and Coal Creek, was organized in 1823 from lands lately ceded by the native peoples of the Wabash valley. To its fertile timber-edged sections came a great migration of upland southerners — Carolinians, Kentuckians, and Marylanders — who, by way of the National Road and the Ohio River, sought freehold farms beyond the slaveholding states. Within this stream of settlement the family's earliest branches established themselves, planting roots that would endure for more than a century.

Among the first to be laid to rest in the county was Rebecca Thomas (d. 1828), a North Carolinian whose burial only five years after the county's founding marks the family's pioneer entry. She was followed in the grave by Elle Milly "Ellen" Price (1782–1844) of Frederick, Maryland, who died at Wingate, and by Nancy Meeks (1782–1845), Pennsylvania-born, who closed her days at Waynetown. The patriarch Joseph Hendrix, alternately rendered Hendricks (1776–1862), likewise a native of North Carolina, lived to see the county transformed from frontier into settled farmland before his death at the age of eighty-six.

The second generation knit the family yet more firmly to the soil. John Hendricks (1805–1874), born in Kentucky, removed to Waynetown and there ended his days; John Grenard (1799–1867) of Fleming County, Kentucky, and his wife Desire Tracy Grenard (1804–1878) of neighboring Mason County both lived out their lives in the county. Elizabeth Smith (1808–1875), an Ohioan, and Alexander Henderson (1810–1911), a Guilford County Carolinian whose extraordinary century of life carried him from the era of Madison to the brink of the First World War, joined the assembly of settlers gathered at Coal Creek. Isabella Chapman (1820–1898) of Butler County, Ohio, and Elisha Grenard (1827–1883) of Kentucky added further to the kinship gathered upon Montgomery soil.

By the third generation the county was no longer destination but birthplace. James Wesley Hendricks (1838–1912) was both born and buried within its bounds, dying in Ripley Township; Amanda Henderson (1843–1927) lived her whole life through to Waynetown; and Alice Marie Hendricks (1883–1966) and Joseph Maroni Grenard (1872–1954), the latter born at Waynetown, came of age there before eventually removing to Indianapolis.

Montgomery County thus stands as the great midwestern hearth of the family — the place where Carolinian, Kentuckian, Marylander, and Ohioan streams converged, intermarried, and from which, in the twentieth century, descendants dispersed toward Indianapolis and beyond.

The rolling Piedmont of central North Carolina — that gentle, red-clay country lying between the Yadkin and the Haw rivers — was, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, one of the great gathering grounds of American dissent. Quaker meetings at New Garden, Cane Creek, and Deep River drew migrants down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah, and Randolph and Guilford counties soon became known throughout the colonies as a region of plain-living farmers, sober worship, and small but tidy homesteads. It was a country of grist mills along the creek bottoms, of split-rail fences and walnut groves, and of a quiet but persistent opposition to the institution of slavery that would, in time, set many of its families once more upon the road westward.

Into this country came JOHN WILKERSON (b. 1730), a native of Pennsylvania who descended the wagon road in the company of so many of his Lancaster County neighbors. He took up his final residence in Randolph County, where he closed his days among the rolling farms of the Deep River settlements. His daughter, Elizabeth Betty Wilkerson (1760–1838), was herself born in Paxtang Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was thus a child of that earlier northern soil; yet her long life of seventy-eight years was lived out chiefly in Randolph County, where she died in the year 1838. Through her, the Wilkerson line was firmly planted in the red clay of the Piedmont for two full generations.

In neighboring Guilford County, only a short remove to the north, was born Alexander Henderson (1810–1911), whose remarkable span of one hundred and one years would carry him from the early Republic into the second decade of the twentieth century. He entered the world among the Quaker farms and meeting-houses of Guilford in 1810, a time when the county was still small and intimate, its people bound together by ties of worship and kinship. Yet his long life would not end in the country of his birth: he died at last in Coal Creek, Montgomery County, Indiana, a witness to that great westward removal which carried so many North Carolina families across the Ohio in the antebellum decades.

Thus the Quaker country of the Carolina Piedmont served the family as a way-station between the Pennsylvania of its colonial origins and the Indiana of its nineteenth-century settlement — a place of two generations' rooting before the road called its descendants on.

Kentucky, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, presented itself to the eastern settler as a country of rolling limestone meadows, cane brakes, and salt licks — a frontier wrested from the Shawnee hunting grounds and opened to settlement only after the long and bloody contest of the Revolutionary years. Admitted to the Union in 1792 as the fifteenth state, it drew an immense tide of migrants from Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, who followed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap or floated flatboats down the Ohio to the landings at Limestone — the rough river port soon renamed Maysville. It was into this Bluegrass country, and chiefly into the adjoining counties of Mason and Fleming, that several lines of the family planted themselves in the first generation of statehood.

Among the earliest of the family's documented arrivals was Anna Annes Potter (1741–1815), Irish-born in Lower Strabane, Tyrone, who closed her long life in Fleming County, Kentucky — a removal that carried her from Ulster across the Atlantic and at last into the western settlements. Of like generation were the Maryland-born sisters of the McDaniel line, Mary Ann McDonald (McDaniel) (1745–1824) and Priscilla McDaniel (1747–1824), both of whom likewise died in Fleming County, their parallel passings in the same year suggesting the close bonds of kindred maintained across that westward removal.

The neighboring county of Mason, with its bustling river town of Maysville, received Veazey William Price (1745–1818) of Cecil County, Maryland, and Samantha "Sim" Ann Barton (1751–1801) of Baltimore. Maysville in their day was the principal portal by which Kentucky received her new inhabitants — a place of warehouses, taverns, and ferry-landings, where the produce of the Bluegrass was loaded for New Orleans and where new settlers were first set ashore. There both Price and Barton ended their days, having transplanted the Maryland strain into Kentucky soil.

By the next generation, the family's Kentucky chapter found its native-born children: John Grenard (1799–1867), born in Fleming County, and Desire Tracy Grenard (1804–1878), born in Mason County. Yet neither was to remain. Both alike died in Montgomery County, Indiana — proof that for this branch of the family, Kentucky proved less a homeland than a way-station, a generation's pause between the tidewater Maryland of their parents and the prairie counties of the Old Northwest into which their children at length carried the family name.

Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century, stood as a great threshold of the New World — a province whose rolling limestone valleys, fertile bottoms, and tolerant laws had drawn waves of German-speaking settlers fleeing the wars and exactions of the Palatinate and the Rhineland. Within this welcoming commonwealth, certain enclaves served as way stations for the Mennonite, Reformed, and Lutheran families who came seeking land and liberty of conscience. Hempfield in Lancaster County, Tulpehocken in Berks, and the Paxtang lands along the Susquehanna were such places — agricultural communities of stone houses, bank barns, and steepled meetinghouses, where the German tongue mingled with Scots-Irish speech along the wagon roads westward.

It is here that the Hyten lines find one of their earliest documented American footings. Anna Maria Schweinforth (1724–1768), born in the early Georgian colonial era, ended her days in Hempfield, Lancaster County, leaving her bones in the rich Pennsylvania soil at the age of forty-four. Her presence there bespeaks the family's participation in the broad German migration that had so thoroughly populated Lancaster County by the mid-eighteenth century, when the township's farms were among the most productive in British North America.

In the same generation, JOHN George Küntz (1750–1829) was born in Tulpehocken, Berks County — a settlement first carved from the wilderness by Palatine pioneers a quarter century earlier, and a community whose name yet rings with the cadence of its German founders. Born on the eve of the French and Indian War, he would come of age amid the upheavals of the American Revolution, and in time remove westward across the Alleghenies, ending his long life in Somerset County in 1829.

His wife, Maria Catharine Schneider (1757–1833), was born in Hempfield, Lancaster County — possibly a daughter of that same neighborhood in which Anna Maria Schweinforth had lately died. Together with John George, she carried the family's fortunes from the older Lancaster and Berks heartland into the rougher upland country of Somerset, where she too was laid to rest.

Of a somewhat different cast was Elizabeth Betty Wilkerson (1760–1838), born in Paxtang Township, Lancaster County, on the Susquehanna frontier — a region of mixed Scots-Irish and German settlement. Unlike her German-surnamed contemporaries, her line did not linger in Pennsylvania, for she removed southward and ended her days in Randolph County, North Carolina.

Thus Pennsylvania served the family as both cradle and corridor: a place of birth and burial for two generations, and the staging ground from which descendants pressed onward into the Alleghenies and the Carolinas.

Indianapolis, seat of Marion County and the capital city of Indiana, rose at the geographic heart of the state upon the gentle flats of the White River. Platted in 1821 by the surveyors Alexander Ralston and Elias Pym Fordham — the former having earlier assisted in the design of Washington City — the town was conceived from its inception as a place of governance, its four diagonal avenues radiating from a central circle. Through the nineteenth century the settlement grew from a malarial clearing into a railroad hub of national consequence, the crossing point of more trunk lines than nearly any other interior city in the Republic. By the close of the Second World War, the city had matured into a populous industrial metropolis, ringed with manufactories and pharmaceutical works, yet retaining the broad streets and church spires of its earlier civic ambition.

It was to this capital city, drawn eastward from the older agricultural communities of Montgomery County, that two members of the family came at last to lay down their final residence. Joseph Maroni Grenard (1872–1954), born in the small village of Waynetown some fifty miles to the northwest, had passed the greater portion of his life within the orbit of Montgomery County before his closing years brought him to Indianapolis, where he died in 1954 at the age of eighty-two. The half-century of his life had spanned a remarkable transformation of the Indiana landscape — from gaslight to electrification, from horse-drawn buggy to motor coach — and his removal to the capital was emblematic of the broader twentieth-century drift of country-born Hoosiers toward the urban center of their state.

Twelve years afterward, Alice Marie Hendricks (1883–1966), likewise a native of Montgomery County, followed the same path to its terminus in Indianapolis, where she died in 1966 in her eighty-third year. Her passing closed the family's documented chapter within Marion County, a tenure of brief but tender significance, marking the place where two Montgomery-born lives at last came to rest.

Within the wider arc of the family's migration, Indianapolis served not as a homestead nor a place of birth, but rather as a final harbor — the city to which an aging generation withdrew from the farms and small towns of west-central Indiana. Marion County thus stands in the archive as a terminus rather than a cradle, the closing parenthesis upon the family's long Montgomery County presence, and a quiet testament to the magnetic pull which the capital exerted upon the rural Indiana of the mid-twentieth century.