David Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is David Libby (1657–1736), a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Scarborough, Maine, his marriage to Eleanor Trickey, his recorded son David Libby, and era context for late 17th-century coastal Maine. Notable: early colonial New England settler in the Province of Maine during the period of frontier conflict.

David Libby (1657–1736) was born in January of 1657 at Scarborough, in what is now Cumberland County, Maine, and died in that same coastal town in 1736, having passed the full arc of his nearly eighty years in the place of his nativity. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 9× great-grandfather, one of the earliest figures preserved within that branch of the family record.

Scarborough in the latter half of the seventeenth century was a small, exposed plantation along the southern coast of the Province of Maine, settled by English fishing and farming families whose lives were ordered by tide, timber, and the seasons of the North Atlantic. The community in which David came of age was repeatedly drawn into the broader conflicts of colonial New England, including King Philip's War and the later French and Indian engagements, which over the course of his lifetime saw frontier settlements abandoned, reoccupied, and rebuilt. That David lived out his full term in Scarborough — being born and dying in the same town across an interval of nearly eight decades — is itself a quiet testament to endurance amid an unsettled era.

He married Eleanor Trickey, whose surname likewise belonged to the early English families of coastal Maine. Of their union, the family register preserves the name of a son, David Libby (1690–1765), who carried his father's name forward into the eighteenth century and continued the line through which the compiler descends. It is likely, given the customs of the period, that other children were born to the household, but the record as transmitted notes only the one son through whom the descent is traced.

David Libby thus represents one of the earliest reliably dated forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandmother line — a colonial Mainer whose life bridged the founding generation of Scarborough and the maturing provincial society of the early Georgian era. He was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.