Capt. Thomas Dixon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Capt. Thomas Dixon (1677–1748), an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-paternal (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in colonial Maryland, his marriage to Sarah Beauchamp, his daughter Elizabeth, and the Chesapeake colonial era. Notable: lifelong residence in Annamessex, Somerset County, Maryland; military or maritime title of Captain.

Capt. Thomas Dixon (1677–1748) stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, in which he occupies the position of an eighth great-grandfather. He was born on the 25th of April, 1677, at Annamessex, in Somerset County, Maryland, and there he closed his days more than seventy years later, on the 24th of February, 1748. The whole arc of his life was thus bound to a single corner of the Chesapeake tidewater — a remarkable constancy in an age when colonial families often drifted from one frontier to the next.

Annamessex, lying on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, was in the late seventeenth century a country of marshes, tidal creeks, and small tobacco plantations. Somerset County had been organized only in 1666, and during Thomas Dixon's lifetime its settlers lived by a mingled economy of planting, fishing, and small coastal trade with the wider Atlantic world. The honorific of Captain borne by Thomas would in that setting have signified either a commission in the county militia, then a customary station for men of standing, or command of a vessel plying the bay — both being avenues by which local gentlemen of the period earned the title.

He was united in marriage to Sarah Beauchamp, a surname long established on the Eastern Shore and of Norman-French derivation. Of their household, the family record preserves the name of one daughter, Elizabeth Dixon, born in 1715 and surviving until 1771. It is through Elizabeth that the Dixon blood descended into the later generations gathered in this register, and ultimately to the compiler.

Little further may be said with certainty of Capt. Thomas Dixon's particular doings, but the dates themselves tell of a long colonial life lived under five English sovereigns, from Charles II to George II, and through the gradual transformation of Maryland from a struggling proprietary outpost into a settled province. Capt. Thomas Dixon was the compiler's eighth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.