Mary Ann Hix

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her colonial Maryland birth, English parentage and death, marriage to John Cox, and a single recorded daughter. Notable: transatlantic life spanning the Maryland colony and Restoration-era England, with a Widdrington maternal connection.

Mary Ann Hix, born in 1650 in Charles, Maryland, and deceased in 1696 in Dunstan, Stepney, Middlesex, England, occupied a transatlantic place in the family record uncommon even among her generation. She entered the world in the young Maryland colony, a proprietary plantation society then scarcely two decades removed from its founding, and ended her life in the crowded riverside parishes east of London — a journey that traced the still-fluid bond between the Chesapeake and the mother country in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

She was the daughter of Richard Edward Hicks, also recorded under the surname Hix (1617–1660), and of Jane Widdrington (1630–1681). The Widdrington name, of long English standing, suggests that her mother's family ties remained firmly anchored in England even as the Hicks line ventured to the Maryland tobacco country. Mary Ann's birth in the colony and her death in Middlesex therefore mirror in a single lifetime the back-and-forth movement characteristic of many colonial-era families, for whom the Atlantic was less a barrier than a long and familiar passage.

Mary Ann was united in marriage to John Cox. From this union the family register preserves the name of one daughter, Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), through whom the line descends to later generations of the compiler's kin. The daughter's long life, stretching nearly to the mid-eighteenth century, ensured that whatever memory and inheritance Mary Ann transmitted endured well beyond her own comparatively brief span of forty-six years.

The England to which Mary Ann returned, or removed, was a kingdom recovering from the upheavals of civil war, plague, and the Great Fire, and Stepney in particular was then a populous riverside parish thick with mariners, tradesmen, and families whose fortunes were bound to the sea and the colonies alike. It is within that setting that her life closed in 1696.

Mary Ann Hix stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a tenth great-grandmother.