Eleanor Trickey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eleanor Trickey (1660–1725), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maine, her mother Elizabeth Shapeleigh, her marriage to David Libby, her son David Libby, and her death at Kittery. Notable: early York County, Maine settler family during the volatile frontier era of King William's and Queen Anne's Wars.

Eleanor Trickey was born in 1660 at Elliot, in York County on the coastal frontier of Maine, then a sparsely settled district administered under the authority of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Shapeleigh, of a family long established in the tidewater settlements of the Piscataqua region, where shipbuilding, fishing, and the timber trade formed the backbone of colonial livelihood. The Shapeleigh name carried considerable weight in early York County affairs, and Eleanor entered the world among neighbors who counted themselves among the founding generations of that province.

The Maine of Eleanor's youth and middle years was a place of remarkable hardship. The latter decades of the seventeenth century brought King Philip's War, King William's War, and Queen Anne's War in succession, each leaving the small Piscataqua and York settlements exposed to raids, abandonment, and rebuilding. That she lived a full life of sixty-five years within this contested frontier speaks to a hardy constitution and to the resilience of the families who remained when so many retreated southward to safer ground.

Eleanor was united in marriage to David Libby, joining her household to one of the Libby families whose descendants would multiply throughout coastal Maine over the following generations. From this union came at least one recorded son, David Libby, born in 1690, who himself lived a long life until 1765 and carried the family forward into the mid-eighteenth century.

Eleanor Trickey died on the 6th of May, 1725, at Kittery, in the same coastal York County where she had spent her years. She was laid to rest amid the community her forebears had helped to establish, leaving behind descendants who would continue the Libby line in Maine and, in time, contribute to the lineage which produced the present compiler.

Eleanor was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.