Reuben Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Reuben Libby (1745–1833), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maine, parentage in the Libby family of Scarboro, marriage to Rebecca Weston, his daughter Eunice, and his death in Jonesborough. Notable: long life spanning the colonial era through the early American republic; deep-rooted Maine Libby lineage.

Reuben Libby (1745–1833) was born on the third of May 1745 at Scarboro, in Cumberland County on the rugged coastal frontier of what was then the Massachusetts province of Maine. He was a son of Major Josiah Libby (1716–1786) and Mary Stone (1722–1786), both of the long-established Libby kindred whose roots in southern Maine reached back to the seventeenth-century English settlement of Scarboro and the neighboring shore towns. His father's militia title of Major reflected the prominence that the Libby family had attained in the civic and defensive life of that coastal community during the unsettled decades of the mid-eighteenth century, when frontier Maine remained vulnerable to disturbances along its long northern reaches.

Reuben came of age in a colony moving steadily toward revolution. Born thirty years before the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington, he passed his early manhood during the very years in which Maine's coastal towns were drawn into the larger struggle for American independence — Scarboro and its neighboring settlements furnishing both men and provisions to the patriot cause.

He married Rebecca Weston, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Eunice Libby (1791–1866), through whom this branch of the family is carried forward in the present register. Reuben lived to a remarkable age for his generation, dying in July of 1833 at Jonesborough in Washington County, far down the eastern Maine coast from the place of his birth. His removal from Scarboro to the Jonesborough region reflected a broader migration in those decades, as families from the older coastal settlements of Cumberland County pressed eastward into the newer townships of Washington County after Maine's separation from Massachusetts in 1820.

His lifespan of eighty-eight years bridged the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods of American history, an unusually long witness to the founding generations of the republic.

Reuben Libby was the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.