Angelina Wilson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Angelina Wilson (1630–1710), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Lincolnshire, England, her transatlantic relocation to colonial Maryland, her marriage to John Scott Lynn Cox, and her son John Cox. Notable: 17th-century English emigrant ancestress of the early Maryland colonial period.

Angelina Wilson (1630–1710) stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the Hyten family register, her life spanning the turbulent middle decades of the seventeenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. She was born in 1630 in Lincolnshire, England, a low-lying agricultural county on the eastern coast known in that era for its fenland villages, its wool and grain trade, and its strong Puritan and Nonconformist religious currents. The England of her childhood was a kingdom moving toward civil war; by the time she reached womanhood, Charles I had been executed, the Commonwealth established under Cromwell, and the monarchy at length restored under Charles II in 1660. Such upheavals drove waves of English emigration to the American colonies throughout her lifetime.

Angelina married John Scott Lynn Cox, and the union produced a son recorded in the family line, John Cox, born about 1650 and dying in 1696. The transatlantic dimension of her life is marked plainly in the register: though born in Lincolnshire, she died in 1710 in Maryland, then a proprietary colony chartered to the Calvert family and noted in the seventeenth century for its policy of religious toleration under the Act Concerning Religion of 1649. Maryland in her later years was a tobacco colony of scattered plantations, river landings, and a population drawn from English, Welsh, and increasingly African and indentured laborers. Whether Angelina crossed the ocean in youth, middle age, or late life is not specified in the family record, but her burial in Maryland places her among the first generation of the Hyten ancestral line to take root in North American soil.

She lived to the age of eighty, an unusually long span for her century, and survived her son John by some fourteen years. Angelina Wilson was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.