Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey (1668–1738), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her mother Elizabeth Hussey, her daughter Mary Daniel, and historical context for early Charles County, Maryland. Notable: late-seventeenth-century colonial Maryland origins at Port Tobacco; longevity into the eighteenth century.

Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey (1668–1738) entered the world at Port Tobacco, in Charles County of the Province of Maryland, in the year 1668. The daughter of Elizabeth Hussey, whose own remarkable lifespan reached from 1645 into 1747, Sarah was born into one of the older settled corners of the Chesapeake tidewater, where tobacco cultivation had already shaped the rhythms of labor, trade, and family life for a generation. Port Tobacco, situated upon a navigable creek of the Potomac, served in that era as one of the principal river ports of southern Maryland, a place where English Catholic and Protestant settlers alike pursued the planter's calling under the proprietary government of the Lords Baltimore.

The several surnames borne by Sarah across her lifetime — Hines, Luckett, Darnall, and Robey — reflect the customs of a colonial society in which women's identities were recorded through successive household attachments, and in which kinship and remarriage knit the small planter community tightly together. Such layered names are a familiar feature of Maryland records of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

From Sarah descended a daughter, Mary Daniel, born in 1688 and living until 1749. Through Mary the family line continued forward into the generations that would, much later, be gathered into the present archive. Sarah's own years spanned a period of considerable change in the colony: the overthrow of proprietary rule in 1689, the establishment of royal government, the rise of Annapolis as capital, and the steady expansion of the tobacco economy into the early Georgian age.

Sarah died on the eighteenth day of August in 1738, in the same Charles County where she had been born seventy years earlier — a rare constancy of place in a restless colonial century. She rests among the earliest American forebears yet recovered in this branch of the family.

Sarah was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.