David Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is David Libby (1690–1765), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Scarborough, Maine, his parentage, his marriage to Esther Hanscom, his son Major Josiah Libby, and his death at Kittery. Notable: colonial Maine settler of the Libby family, a prominent early New England lineage.

David Libby was born in 1690 at Scarborough, in Cumberland County on the rugged coast of Maine, and died on the sixth of February, 1765, at Kittery in York County, having lived nearly seventy-five years within the seaboard towns of colonial Maine. He was the son of David Libby (1657–1736) and Eleanor Trickey (1660–1725), and stood within the second American-born generation of the Libby family, a household well established along the Maine coast since the earliest English settlement of that province.

The Maine of David's youth was a precarious frontier. Scarborough and the neighboring coastal settlements suffered repeated devastation during the long series of conflicts known to history as King William's War and Queen Anne's War, and many families of the region were displaced southward into the older towns of Massachusetts and the more defensible parts of York County during the early eighteenth century. The community at Kittery, the oldest town in Maine and the place of David's death, was among those refuges and remained a center of Libby kin throughout the colonial period.

David married Esther Hanscom, joining two families long resident along the Piscataqua and Saco frontiers. Of their union is recorded a son, Josiah Libby (1716–1786), who in adulthood bore the title of Major — a rank suggesting service in the provincial militia during the colonial wars that shaped New England in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Through this son the Libby line carried forward into the Revolutionary generation.

David lived through the reigns of four British monarchs, from William and Mary through George III, and saw Maine pass from a hard-pressed frontier into a more settled province on the eve of American independence, which he did not live to witness.

David Libby was an eighth great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.