Sarah Beauchamp

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Beauchamp (1695–1750), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her marriage to Capt. Thomas Dixon, her daughter Elizabeth Dixon, her death in 1750, and contextual notes on early 18th-century Chesapeake society.

Sarah Beauchamp (1695–1750) was born about the year 1695 at Annemessex, in Somerset County, Maryland, then a remote tidewater settlement on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay within Colonial British America. The Annemessex region in the closing years of the seventeenth century was a sparsely settled frontier of marsh, creek, and tobacco land, populated by English colonists who had pressed southward from the older Maryland settlements to take up patents along the inlets of the lower Eastern Shore. Into this society of small planters, watermen, and modest gentry Sarah was born and reared.

In the course of her life Sarah married Capt. Thomas Dixon, a union that joined her to a household of some standing, as the captaincy attached to her husband's name indicates either militia rank or maritime command — both common designations of respectability in the Chesapeake of that era, when local defense and coastwise navigation alike fell to men of consequence in the county. From this marriage came at least one daughter known to the family record, Elizabeth Dixon, born in 1715 and living until 1771. Through Elizabeth the line descended forward into the generations of the compiler's paternal-grandfather branch.

Sarah's life spanned the first half of the eighteenth century, a period in which Maryland matured from frontier province into an established colony of plantations, parish churches, and growing county courts. Women of her station ordinarily presided over substantial households, managed dairies and kitchens, oversaw the rearing and instruction of children, and bore much of the labor that sustained colonial domestic economy. The particulars of Sarah's daily life are not preserved in the present record, but her place within this colonial generation is secure.

Sarah Beauchamp died before the 14th of February, 1750, in Maryland, that date marking the probate or settlement of her estate. She was an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.