Elizabeth HUSSEY

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Hussey (1645–1747), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Maryland, her remarkable longevity of more than a century, her daughter Sarah, and the historical context of early Charles County and Port Tobacco Parish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Elizabeth Hussey was born about the year 1645 in Portobacco, Charles County, in the colony of Maryland, and departed this life on the fifth day of June, 1747, in Port Tobacco Parish of the same county. Her life thus spanned an extraordinary one hundred and two years, a length of days uncommon in any era and especially so in the colonial period, during which disease, childbirth, and the rigors of frontier settlement frequently shortened the lives of even the most robust.

Her entire recorded life unfolded in Charles County, Maryland, on the western shore of the Potomac. Port Tobacco, from which the parish took its name, was in the latter half of the seventeenth century a thriving tobacco port and one of the principal settlements of the Maryland colony, second in importance among the early towns of the province. The Maryland into which Elizabeth was born had been founded only a decade earlier under the proprietorship of the Lords Baltimore, and during her lifetime it passed through the Protestant Revolution of 1689, the transition to royal governance, and at last the restoration of proprietary rule — a turbulent civic and religious landscape against which her quiet domestic life was set.

Of her marriage and household, the family record preserves the name of one daughter, Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey, who was born in 1668 and lived until 1738. Sarah's several surnames, gathered through the course of her own long life, suggest a woman well established within the planter society of tidewater Maryland, and they link the Hussey line by marriage to families of substance in the region.

Elizabeth outlived her daughter by nearly a decade, surviving into the middle of the eighteenth century and the reign of George II. She stands among the earliest and longest-lived forebears recorded in this register, a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.