John Scott Lynn Cox

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Scott Lynn Cox (1625–1700), a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth in Sussex, parentage, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage to Angelina Wilson, and his son John. Notable: early colonial Maryland settler, part of the 17th-century English migration to the Chesapeake.

John Scott Lynn Cox (1625–1700) stood among the earliest forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line to cross the Atlantic, bridging the old country and the new in the formative decades of English settlement in the Chesapeake. Born in 1625 at Lindfield, in the rolling Wealden country of Sussex, England, he was the son of John Cox (1605–1690) and Mary Sicklemore (1605–1698). Lindfield in that period was a market village set among the cloth-working parishes of southern England, and the years of John's youth coincided with the political and religious tumult of the reign of Charles I, the gathering storms of the English Civil War, and the upheavals that drove tens of thousands of Englishmen and women toward the American colonies in search of land, livelihood, and freer worship.

John took as his wife Angelina Wilson, and from their union came at least one recorded son, John Cox (1650–1696), through whom the line descends to the compiler. By the close of his life, John Scott Lynn Cox had removed to St Mary's County, Maryland, the cradle of the Maryland colony founded under the proprietorship of the Lords Baltimore in 1634. St Mary's County in the latter half of the seventeenth century was a tobacco country of scattered plantations along the tidewater inlets, peopled by English settlers of mixed Catholic and Protestant background, and governed under the famous Act Concerning Religion of 1649. It was in this colonial setting that John died before the year 1700, having lived a full seventy-five years that spanned the reigns of four English monarchs and the establishment of a permanent English presence on the Potomac.

John Scott Lynn Cox was the compiler's tenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.