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, the multiple surnames suggesting successive marriages, and historical context of late seventeenth-century Charles County, Maryland.

Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey was born in 1668 at Port Tobacco, in Charles County, in the Province of Maryland, and died there on the eighteenth of August, 1738, having lived through seven decades that spanned the transformation of the Chesapeake from a frontier tobacco colony into a settled, hierarchical society. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Hussey (1645–1747), whose own remarkable longevity is recorded elsewhere in this register.

The succession of surnames preserved alongside her given name — Hines, Luckett, Darnall, and Robey — suggests a life marked by more than one marriage, a circumstance not uncommon among colonial women of the Tidewater, where the hazards of childbirth, fever, and the rigors of plantation life frequently widowed and remarried both sexes in turn. Port Tobacco, situated upon a navigable creek of the Potomac, was in her lifetime one of the principal towns of southern Maryland, a port of entry for English goods and a shipping point for the hogsheads of leaf tobacco that constituted the colony's chief wealth. The surrounding county was home to a notable population of Roman Catholic gentry, the Maryland colony having been founded under the proprietorship of the Calverts as a refuge for that faith, though by Sarah's adult years the establishment of the Church of England had altered the religious landscape considerably.

Of her children, the register preserves the name of Mary Daniel (1688–1749), born when Sarah was about twenty years of age, and who lived into the middle of the eighteenth century. Through this daughter the line descended into successive generations of the family here recorded.

Sarah's death in 1738, in the county of her birth, closes a life lived wholly within the bounds of colonial Charles County, Maryland. She stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandmother.