Mary Stone

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Stone (1722–1786), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maine, her parentage, marriage to Major Josiah Libby, motherhood, and removal to Machias. Notable: her life spanned the late colonial era through the American Revolution along the northeastern Maine frontier.

Mary Stone was born on the 2nd of December, 1722, at Eliot, in York County, in what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She came into the world as the daughter of Daniel John Stone (1689–1735) and Sarah Jenkins (1689–1741), a household rooted in the older English settlements that lined the Piscataqua region of southern Maine. Her childhood unfolded in a colonial coastal community where shipbuilding, fishing, and timber sustained successive generations, and where the rhythms of meeting-house and tide-line shaped family life.

Mary was twelve years of age when her father died in 1735, and not yet nineteen when she lost her mother in 1741 — losses that, in the manner of the colonial era, often hastened a young woman's entry into a household of her own. In due course she was joined in marriage to Major Josiah Libby, taking on a name long established among the Libbys of coastal Maine. The military title borne by her husband reflects the perennial obligation of frontier service that fell upon able men in the northeastern colonies, where conflict with French and Indigenous forces had not yet given way to the Revolutionary struggles of later decades.

Of this union there is recorded a son, Reuben Libby, born in 1745, who lived a long life until 1833 and through whom Mary's line descended.

Mary's later years were passed at the far eastern edge of settled Maine, in Machias, Washington County — a community famed in the annals of the American Revolution for its early naval engagement of 1775. There, on the 24th of April, 1786, in the third year following the formal independence of the new United States, Mary Stone closed her earthly course at the age of sixty-three.

Mary was a seventh-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.