Mary Martha Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth and death, her parentage in St. Mary's County, her son Thomas Cawood, and colonial-era context for the Chesapeake region. Notable: lifelong residence in proprietary colonial Maryland, spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748) was born on the first day of January 1671 in St. Marys, St. Mary's County, Maryland, and died there on 1 February 1748 at Hull Plantation, having lived her seventy-seven years within the bounds of a single Chesapeake county. She was the daughter of John Cox (1650–1696) and Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696), both of whom predeceased her by more than half a century, dying in the same year while Mary Martha was a young woman of twenty-five.

The Maryland into which Mary Martha was born was a proprietary colony chartered to the Calvert family, and St. Mary's County, established as the colony's first settlement in 1634, served as its original capital until the seat of government was removed to Annapolis in 1695. During her early adulthood, the county thus shifted from political center to an agricultural society oriented around tobacco cultivation, riverine commerce, and the great plantations that bordered the Potomac and the Patuxent. Hull Plantation, where she ended her days, was one such landed estate characteristic of the region.

From Mary Martha descended a son, Thomas Cawood (1697–1766), born when she was twenty-six years of age. Through him the line was carried forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the broader paternal-grandfather branch of the compiler's family. The Cawood surname borne by her son indicates her marriage into that house, though the particulars of that union are not recorded in the present archive.

Mary Martha's life encompassed remarkable continuity of place in an age of frequent colonial upheaval — the Glorious Revolution's reverberations in Maryland, the establishment of the Anglican Church as the colony's establishment, and the slow consolidation of plantation society all passed during her lifetime, yet she remained within the boundaries of St. Mary's County from birth to grave.

Mary Martha was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.