Richard Edward 15 Hicks Hix

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Edward Hicks (Hix) (1617–1660), a 10× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, parentage, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage, and sole recorded child. Notable: early 17th-century Devon origins and immigrant presence on the Patuxent River during the founding generation of the Maryland colony.

Richard Edward Hicks, also recorded under the variant surname Hix, was born on the 20th of December, 1617, in the parish of Bridgerule, Devon, in the southwest of England. He was the son of Gilbert E. Hicks, who survived until 1640, and Elizabeth Townes, who preceded her husband in death in 1639. Richard came of age during a turbulent generation in English life, his youth unfolding against the rising tensions between Crown and Parliament that would erupt into the English Civil War in the 1640s, and his early adulthood coinciding with the great Puritan and Cavalier migrations across the Atlantic.

In time Richard crossed the ocean and established himself along the Patuxent River, in what was then Calvert County, in the young proprietary colony of Maryland. Founded in 1634 under the charter granted to the Calvert family, Maryland in the mid-seventeenth century was a sparsely settled tidewater society of tobacco plantations, riverine landings, and small holdings, where English-born settlers of varied religious persuasions sought land and opportunity along the broad estuaries of the Chesapeake.

Richard married Jane Widdrington, and of their union the record preserves one daughter, Mary Ann Hix, born in 1650 and surviving until 1696. Through this daughter the line continued into succeeding generations of the family.

Richard Edward Hicks died on the 8th of January, 1660, on the Patuxent River in Calvert County, Maryland, at the age of forty-two. His passing came on the eve of the Restoration of King Charles II in England, a moment when the colonies he had adopted as home stood poised between the upheavals of the Commonwealth years and the renewed colonial expansion that would follow.

Richard was the compiler's 10× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing among the earliest transatlantic forebears recorded in the Hyten family archive.