Sarah LIBBY

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Libby (1653–1729), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maine, her parentage in the Libby line, her marriage to Richard Rogers, her daughter Alice, and the era context of frontier seventeenth-century Maine settlements.

Sarah Libby was born in 1653 at Scarborough, in what was then the frontier county of Cumberland in the District of Maine, and she died in January 1729 at Kittery, in York County, Maine, having lived more than seventy-five years upon the rugged northern coast of New England. Her long life spanned a remarkable and often violent chapter in the history of colonial Maine, from the earliest decades of permanent English settlement through the repeated upheavals of King Philip's War, King William's War, and Queen Anne's War, conflicts which depopulated and rebuilt the coastal towns of Maine more than once during her lifetime.

She was a daughter of John Skillings Libby (1602–1682), a patriarch of the Libby family in early Maine. The Libbys were among the founding English families of Scarborough, and their name became one of the most numerous in the region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To be born into the Libby household in 1653 was to be born into a household engaged in the hard work of establishing fisheries, farms, and timber holdings along an exposed and contested coast.

Sarah was united in marriage to Richard Rogers, and from this union came a daughter, Alice Rogers, born in 1671 and dying young in 1696 at only twenty-five years of age. Alice carried the family line forward before her early death, and through her the descent into the compiler's paternal-grandmother line was preserved.

That Sarah herself endured into 1729, outliving her daughter by more than three decades, speaks to a constitution and a fortitude characteristic of the women of colonial Maine, whose lives were measured against frequent loss, hard winters, and the uncertainties of frontier existence. Sarah Libby stands in the compiler's pedigree as a tenth-great-grandmother in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.