Ann Hitchcock

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ann Hitchcock (1722–1792), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her maternal line through Anne Jones, her known daughter Samantha Ann Barton, her death in Harford County, and the broader era context of eighteenth-century Maryland.

Ann Hitchcock was born in 1722 or early 1723 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, in the colony of Maryland, and departed this life on the first of May, 1792, in Harford County of that same state. Her seventy years thus spanned the long arc from the late proprietary period under the Calverts, through the upheavals of the French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the establishment of the young American republic — a remarkable breadth of history witnessed from the tidewater country of the Chesapeake.

She was the daughter of Anne Jones (1700–1741), who herself stands in the family register as a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler. Ann was therefore born into a Maryland already two generations removed from its earliest English settlement, in a colony marked by tobacco cultivation, religious diversity, and the steady knitting together of family lines along the upper Chesapeake. The early loss of her mother in 1741, when Ann was a young woman of about eighteen or nineteen, would have placed her on the threshold of adult life in a household altered by grief.

The register records one daughter to her name: Samantha Ann Barton, known within the family by the affectionate diminutive "Sim," who was born in 1751 and lived until 1801. Through this daughter the line carried forward into the next generation of the compiler's ancestry, and the surname Barton joined Hitchcock and Jones upon the pedigree.

Ann's removal from Baltimore County to Harford County, where she ended her days, would have been no great journey, as Harford was carved from Baltimore County in 1773; many families found themselves residents of a new jurisdiction without ever leaving their land. She died in the spring of 1792, in the fourth year of the federal Constitution.

Ann Hitchcock was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.