Jane 15 Widdrington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Widdrington (1630–1681), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth, transatlantic life ending in colonial Maryland, marriage to Richard Edward Hicks (Hix), and her single recorded daughter. Notable: she represents the family's 17th-century English-to-Chesapeake migration into early Calvert County, Maryland.

Jane Widdrington was born in 1630 in Devon, England, and died in 1681 in Calvert County, Maryland — a life of fifty-one years that traced the arc of the early English colonial migration to the Chesapeake. Her birth in Devon placed her among that southwestern English population from which a substantial portion of the early Maryland settlers were drawn, a region whose maritime towns and agricultural hinterlands sent steady streams of emigrants westward across the Atlantic in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The England of her infancy was one of mounting religious and political strain; her childhood and youth coincided with the upheavals of the Civil Wars, the execution of Charles I, the Interregnum under Cromwell, and at length the Restoration of 1660 — a turbulent backdrop against which many families of her generation reconsidered their futures and looked toward the American plantations.

Jane was united in marriage to Richard Edward Hicks, sometimes recorded under the surname Hix, and by him she became the mother of at least one recorded daughter, Mary Ann Hix, born about 1650 and surviving until 1696. The family's settlement in Calvert County placed them in one of the earliest organized counties of the Maryland colony, established in 1654 along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Calvert County in Jane's day was a landscape of tobacco plantations, tidewater creeks, and small dispersed settlements, governed under the proprietorship of the Lords Baltimore and notable in the wider colonial world for its early policies of religious toleration. It was in that setting that Jane lived out her later years and died in 1681.

Through her daughter Mary Ann, Jane Widdrington's line passed forward across the generations of the Chesapeake and, in due course, into the broader family from which the present record descends. Jane stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a 10× great-grandmother.