Rachel Atkinson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rachel Atkinson (1688–1748), a maternal figure of the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line and an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Maryland, her marriage to Jonathan Jackson, her son Thomas Jackson, and the era-context of Somerset County in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Rachel Atkinson (1688–1748) was born in Somerset, Maryland, during the closing years of the seventeenth century, and there, sixty years later, she also concluded her earthly course. Her life thus unfolded entirely within the bounds of a single colonial county on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, a region whose tidewater landscape was, in her lifetime, settled by a mixture of English planters, Scots-Irish migrants, and a smaller community of Quakers and other dissenters who had been drawn to Maryland's relatively tolerant religious climate. Somerset County in the early eighteenth century was a place of small tobacco farms, water-borne commerce, and parish life ordered increasingly under the established Church of England following the colonial reforms of the 1690s.

Rachel was joined in marriage to Jonathan Jackson, and from that union there issued a son, Thomas Jackson, born in 1728 — when Rachel was about forty years of age — and who would himself live until 1766. Through this son the Jackson line carried forward into the next generation of the family that the present register traces. Although the surviving record preserves no further account of Rachel's domestic occupations, her religious affiliation, or the particulars of her household, her enduring residence in Somerset County across six decades suggests a life rooted in the agrarian and ecclesiastical rhythms typical of the colonial Chesapeake: planting and harvest, the seasonal arrival of merchant vessels along the inlets of the bay, and the steady round of births, marriages, and burials recorded in parish registers of the period.

That Rachel was both born and died in the same county was itself not uncommon among colonial women of her generation, for whom the geographic horizon was often defined by the parish, the plantation, and the navigable creek.

Rachel Atkinson was an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.