Jabez H Jenkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jabez H Jenkins (1655–1697), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maine, his immigrant parentage, marriage to Hannah Anna Curtis, his daughter Sarah, and the frontier era context of late seventeenth-century York County. Notable: born in the first American-born generation of his line in the Province of Maine.

Jabez H Jenkins (1655–1697) was born on the sixteenth of May, 1655, in Eliot, York County, in the Province of Maine, then under the loose jurisdiction of British colonial New England. He was the son of Reginald Reynold Jenkins (1608–1683) and Ann Gale (1615–1678), both of whom had crossed the Atlantic from the Old World to settle along the rugged Piscataqua frontier. Jabez thus belonged to the first American-born generation of his line, raised in a community still shaped by the labor, hazard, and hope of the immigrant household.

The Maine coast of Jabez's lifetime was a place of small tidewater settlements, sawmills, fishing shallops, and timber bound for the wider Atlantic trade. It was also a contested frontier: the latter half of the seventeenth century brought repeated conflict between the English settlements and the Wabanaki peoples, with King Philip's War and King William's War unsettling the towns of York County during Jabez's adult years. Eliot and neighboring Kittery, where he would die, were among the older English plantings in that landscape.

Jabez married Hannah Anna Curtis, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Sarah Jenkins (1689–1741), who would carry the line forward into the eighteenth century. Sarah was a small child when her father died, and the household, like many of that place and era, would have weathered the early loss within the close kinship networks that bound the coastal Maine settlements together.

Jabez died on the second of November, 1697, in Kittery, York County, then within the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction that had absorbed the Province of Maine. He was forty-two years of age.

Jabez was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, standing among the earliest colonial-born ancestors documented in this branch of the family.