Mary Martha Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, parentage, marriage to Stephen Cawood III, her son John Thomas Cawood, and her long life on Hull Plantation. Notable: a deep-colonial Maryland forebear of the Catholic-proprietary era, spanning the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Mary Martha Cox was born on the first day of January 1671 in St. Marys, St. Mary's County, Maryland, and died on the first day of February 1748 at Hull Plantation in the same county, having lived seventy-seven years within the bounds of her native province. Her life thus spanned almost the whole arc of Maryland's transition from a fledgling proprietary colony under the Calverts to a settled and increasingly populous Chesapeake society on the eve of the imperial conflicts that would precede the American Revolution.

She was the daughter of John Cox (1650–1696) and Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696), both of whom died in the same year, when Mary Martha was twenty-five. Her birthplace of St. Mary's City had served as the original capital of the Maryland colony and was, in her youth, still a center of tobacco cultivation and tidewater plantation life. The county in which she lived out her years bore the distinctive religious character of early Maryland, founded as a refuge in which Catholic and Protestant settlers alike sought to establish households along the rivers and creeks of the lower Chesapeake.

Mary Martha was married to Stephen Cawood III, joining the Cox line to the Cawood family, a union typical of the intermarried planter households that formed the social fabric of St. Mary's County in that generation. To this marriage was born at least one son of record, John Thomas Cawood (1693–1767), who carried the family forward into the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

She is recorded as having died at Hull Plantation, suggesting a continued attachment to the landed life of her parish and county. Her long widowhood or married life is not further documented in the family papers, but her endurance through the smallpox epidemics, tobacco economy, and proprietary disputes of her age testifies to a hardy constitution.

Mary Martha Cox was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.