Jane 15 Widdrington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Widdrington (1630–1681), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth, transatlantic relocation to colonial Maryland, marriage to Richard Edward Hicks (Hix), and her daughter Mary Ann. Notable: she was among the early English settlers of Calvert County during Maryland's proprietary colonial period under the Calvert family.

Jane Widdrington (1630–1681) entered the world in Devon, England, a maritime county on the southwestern coast whose port towns had long sent ships, merchants, and settlers across the Atlantic. The decade of her birth was one of mounting religious and political tension in England, the years that would culminate in civil war and the upheaval of the 1640s. It was against this turbulent backdrop that countless families of Devon and the West Country looked westward, toward the developing English colonies on the Chesapeake.

Jane was joined in marriage to Richard Edward Hicks, occasionally rendered Hix in the surviving records, and to this union was born at least one daughter, Mary Ann Hix (1650–1696). Whether Mary Ann's birth occurred in England or in the colonies is not recorded here, though the year falls within the active period of English migration to Maryland, the proprietary colony founded under the charter granted to the Calvert family in 1632.

Jane's life closed in 1681 in Calvert County, Maryland, situated along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay between the Patuxent and the Bay itself. Calvert County in her time was a tobacco country of dispersed plantations, modest landings, and a population still small and intimately connected by kinship and trade. The colony, distinctive among the English settlements for its early policy of religious toleration, drew settlers of varied confessional backgrounds, and its households were knit together as much by shared frontier conditions as by formal community institutions.

That Jane crossed an ocean in the course of her fifty-one years, exchanging the green hills of Devon for the tidewater forests of Maryland, places her firmly among the first generation of Hyten forebears to take root in North American soil. Through her daughter Mary Ann, the line continued forward across the generations.

Jane Widdrington was the compiler's 11× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.