Margaret Lee

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Lee (1658–1704), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler along the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial-era Ontario, her death in Cecil, Maryland, her son Thomas Esau Price, and historical context for women of the late seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Notable: a rare instance of a Canadian-born ancestor in the colonial American branch.

Margaret Lee (1658–1704) stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, reaching back nine generations into the colonial period of North America. She was born in 1658 in what is now Ontario, Canada — a striking detail in a family tree otherwise weighted toward the English colonies of the Atlantic seaboard, for the territory of her birth lay then within the contested frontier between French claims, indigenous nations, and the slow westward press of English commerce. The European population of the region in the mid-seventeenth century was sparse, and the records of its inhabitants survive only in fragments.

By the close of her life, Margaret had made her way south into the English Chesapeake, dying in 1704 in Cecil County, Maryland. Cecil County, situated at the head of the bay where the Susquehanna River empties into tidewater, had been formally established in 1674 and was, in Margaret's adulthood, a frontier of small tobacco plantations, Quaker meetings, and mixed English, Welsh, and Swedish settlement. Women in such a community shouldered the labor of household provisioning, dairying, weaving, and the rearing of large families amid the constant threats of fever and childbirth mortality.

Margaret's recorded issue includes a son, Thomas Esau Price, born in 1675 and living to the considerable age of eighty-nine, dying in 1764. Through Thomas the line descended onward to the compiler. Of Margaret's husband, of her parents, and of the circumstances by which a woman born in Ontario came to die in Maryland, the family record is at present silent, leaving these matters as invitations to future research rather than as settled history.

Margaret Lee was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an early matriarch whose life bridged the French-influenced north and the English Chesapeake.