Mary Ann Hix

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her colonial Maryland birth, English parentage, marriage to John Cox, her daughter Mary Martha Cox, and her death in Middlesex, England. Notable: transatlantic life spanning the early Maryland colony and Restoration-era England.

Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696) was born in Charles, Maryland, in the earliest decades of that colony's settlement, and she stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandmother. Her parents were Richard Edward Hicks (also rendered Hix), 1617–1660, and Jane Widdrington, 1630–1681 — a union that bound together the Hicks and Widdrington names across the Atlantic during a turbulent age of colonial expansion and English civil strife.

Mary Ann's birthplace in Charles County, Maryland, placed her among the first generation of children born into the Chesapeake tobacco colonies, a region then characterized by scattered plantations, a predominantly Protestant and Catholic English settler population, and uncertain frontier conditions. Maryland in the mid-seventeenth century was still a young proprietary colony under the Calverts, and families of English origin frequently maintained ties — by correspondence, commerce, and travel — to their homeland. Mary Ann's life would ultimately reflect those continuing transatlantic bonds.

She married John Cox, and from that union came at least one recorded daughter, Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), through whom the line descended toward the compiler. The naming of the daughter after the mother was a common practice of the period and preserved the maternal identity across generations.

Mary Ann died in 1696 in Dunstan, Stepney, in the County of Middlesex, England — a parish then situated on the eastern outskirts of London, populated heavily by mariners, dockworkers, and tradespeople connected to the Thames and to overseas commerce. Her presence in Stepney at the close of her life suggests the family's continuing movement between the American colonies and England, a pattern not unusual for those whose fortunes or kinship ties bridged both shores during the Restoration era.

Mary Ann Hix was a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.