Major Josiah Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Major Josiah Libby (1716–1786), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Kittery, Maine, his parentage in the Libby and Hanscom lines, his marriage to Mary Stone, his son Reuben, and his death at Machias on the eastern Maine frontier. Notable: military title of Major, frontier Maine settler era.

Major Josiah Libby (1716–1786) entered the world on the twenty-fifth of October, 1716, in that portion of old Kittery known as Eliot, in York County in the Province of Maine. He was the son of David Libby (1690–1765) and Esther Hanscom (1692–1761), placing him firmly within two of the older English families long established along the Piscataqua River and the southern Maine coast. The Libbys had been seated in Kittery and the surrounding settlements since the seventeenth century, weathering successive frontier wars, and Josiah came of age within that hardy coastal community.

In the fullness of time he married Mary Stone, and from their union came at least one recorded son, Reuben Libby (1745–1833), through whom this line descends. The military title of Major borne by Josiah indicates a man of standing within the provincial militia, a station of no small consequence in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Maine frontier remained vulnerable to conflict between the English colonies and the French and their allied nations to the north. Men of his rank were called upon both for defense and for civil leadership in communities still being carved out of the forest.

The latter portion of Josiah's life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American history: the unrest of the 1760s, the Revolution itself, and the early years of the new republic. The eastern reach of Maine, where Machias lay, was a remote and contested district during these years, the town of Machias being noted in the broader history of the Revolution for early maritime resistance against British authority in 1775.

Major Josiah Libby died on the seventeenth of April, 1786, at Machias in Washington County, Maine, having lived seventy years and removed in his later life from the older settlements of York County to that eastern frontier. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 7× great-grandfather.