Elizabeth Dixon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Dixon (1715–1771), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, parentage in the Dixon and Beauchamp families, marriage to William Turpin, her son and the lineage continuation. Notable: early-eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonial roots on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Elizabeth Dixon (1715–1771) was born in Somerset County, Maryland, in the year 1715, into the established colonial society of the Chesapeake's Eastern Shore. She was the daughter of Capt. Thomas Dixon (1677–1748) and Sarah Beauchamp (1695–1750), a union that joined two families long settled in the tidewater communities of Somerset. Her father bore the rank of Captain, a designation that in early eighteenth-century Maryland frequently indicated leadership in the colonial militia or in maritime trade — both being central pillars of life along the lower Chesapeake, where tobacco cultivation, small shipping, and the steady cross-bay traffic with Virginia shaped daily existence.

Elizabeth came of age during a period of relative stability in proprietary Maryland, when the Eastern Shore counties were maturing from frontier outposts into settled agricultural districts dotted with Anglican parishes, modest plantations, and the rising mercantile activity of the Pocomoke and Wicomico drainages. Families of her station tended to intermarry within the close circle of Somerset's planter households, and the Dixon and Beauchamp surnames recur frequently in the parish and county records of that region.

Elizabeth married William Turpin, uniting her line with another Eastern Shore family. Of this marriage there is recorded a son, William Turpin (1752–1789), through whom the lineage descends. The relative lateness of her son's birth, when Elizabeth was in her thirty-seventh year, was not uncommon in an era when childbearing extended across the full span of a woman's married life and when the survival of a particular child to maturity was itself a matter of fortune.

Elizabeth Dixon died on the 20th of November, 1771, having outlived both of her parents by more than two decades. She belonged to the colonial generations whose lives were lived wholly under the British Crown, before the upheavals of the Revolution reached the Chesapeake. Elizabeth was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.