Richard Edward 15 Hicks Hix

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Edward Hicks (also rendered Hix) (1617–1660), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth in Devon, his parentage, marriage to Jane Widdrington, his daughter Mary Ann, and his death along the Patuxent River in colonial Maryland. Notable: early transatlantic migration from Devon, England to the Maryland colony in the mid-17th century.

Richard Edward Hicks, sometimes recorded under the variant spelling Hix, was born on the 20th of December, 1617, in the parish of Bridgerule, Devon, in the West Country of England. He was the son of Gilbert E. Hicks, who died in 1640, and Elizabeth Townes, who preceded her husband in death in 1639. Richard thus came of age in a household marked by the loss of both parents while he was still a young man in his early twenties — a circumstance not uncommon in the early seventeenth century, when life expectancy in rural England remained modest and epidemic illness moved freely through village communities.

Devon in this period was a region of seafaring tradition and steady emigration. The ports of the southwestern English coast sent many young men and families across the Atlantic to the new colonies in the Chesapeake, where tobacco cultivation was rapidly drawing English settlers into Virginia and the newly chartered province of Maryland, established under Lord Baltimore in 1634. It was into this colonial setting that Richard's own life was eventually drawn.

Richard married Jane Widdrington, and from that union came at least one recorded daughter, Mary Ann Hix, born in 1650 and surviving until 1696. Through Mary Ann the family line continued forward across the generations into the compiler's own ancestry.

Richard died on the 8th of January, 1660, along the Patuxent River in Calvert County, Maryland — one of the earliest tidewater counties of the Maryland colony, situated between the Patuxent and the Chesapeake Bay. The region in the mid-seventeenth century was a patchwork of tobacco plantations, small landings, and scattered settlements carved from forested shoreline. He was forty-two years of age at his death.

Richard Edward Hicks stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as an 11× great-grandfather, representing one of the family's earliest documented transatlantic forebears, bridging the parish registers of Devon and the colonial shores of Maryland.