Anna Wilkinson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Wilkinson (1705–1774), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Baltimore, parentage, marriage to Georgÿ Haramÿn I, her daughter Patience Harryman, and the early colonial Maryland context of her life.

Anna Wilkinson (1705–1774) was born in the year 1705 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, in the Province of Maryland, and there, nearly seven decades later, in December of 1774, she also died. The whole arc of her life thus unfolded within the bounds of a single colonial county, on the tidewater margins of the Chesapeake.

She was the daughter of William Hunter Wilkinson (1648–1718) and Tamar Love (1651–1722), a couple whose own lifespans bridged the 17th-century settlement of the Maryland colony and the maturing planter society of the early 18th century. Anna entered the world during the proprietorship of the Calvert family, when Baltimore County remained largely agrarian, oriented toward tobacco cultivation, riverine commerce, and the slow growth of what would, decades later, become the city of Baltimore.

Anna was joined in marriage to Georgÿ Haramÿn I, the archaic orthography of whose surname suggests records kept in the older hand of colonial scribes; the line is more commonly rendered Harryman in later generations. Of this union there is recorded a daughter, Patience Harryman (1733–1763), whose own life would prove tragically short, ending more than a decade before her mother's. Anna therefore outlived her child — a sorrow not uncommon in the demographic realities of the colonial Chesapeake, where epidemic disease, childbirth, and ordinary hazards claimed many before their parents.

That Anna died in December of 1774, on the very threshold of the American Revolution, places her among that generation of colonial women whose lives spanned the high tide of British provincial rule but did not extend into the new republic. The Baltimore she left behind in late 1774 was already a town stirred by the politics of resistance, with the First Continental Congress having only recently adjourned.

Anna was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.