John Skillings Libby

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Skillings Libby (1602–1682), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English origins in Plymouth, Devon, his emigration to colonial New England, his settlement in Scarborough in the Province of Maine, his parentage and known issue. Notable: early 17th-century English emigrant ancestor among the founding settlers of coastal Maine.

John Skillings Libby, born the eleventh of November, 1602, in the seaport of Plymouth in Devon, England, and gathered to his rest on the ninth of February, 1682, at Scarborough in the county of Cumberland, in what is now the State of Maine, stands among the earliest English forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line. He was a son of John W. Libby, whose own death is likewise noted in the year 1682, marking the close of a generation that bridged the Old World and the New.

Plymouth in the opening years of the seventeenth century was one of the great maritime towns of England, and from its harbor departed many of the vessels that carried Englishmen across the Atlantic to the fisheries, trading posts, and infant plantations of New England. It was into this seafaring world that John Skillings Libby was born, and it was upon the rugged coast of the District of Maine — then a frontier of the Massachusetts Bay jurisdiction — that he eventually settled. Scarborough, situated upon the broken shoreline south of Casco Bay, was in his lifetime a small and exposed plantation, repeatedly tried by the hardships of weather, isolation, and the conflicts that troubled the northern frontier in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

Of his issue, the family register preserves the name of a daughter, Sarah Libby, born in 1653 and surviving until 1729, through whom the line descends to the present compiler. That John Skillings Libby and his father appear to have departed this life in the same year, 1682, suggests the closing of an era for the family in coastal Maine, even as the next generation carried the name forward.

John Skillings Libby was an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandmother (PM) line, and stands among the earliest of the English emigrant ancestors here recorded.