Tamar Love

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Tamar Love (1651–1722), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her parentage by Robert Love and Sarah Bond, her marriage to William Hunter Wilkinson, her daughter Anna Wilkinson, and the early Chesapeake setting of her life. Notable: 17th-century Maryland colonial ancestor.

Tamar Love was born on the tenth of November, 1651, in the colony of Maryland, and departed this life on the twenty-seventh of March, 1722, in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland, having lived through some of the most formative decades of the Chesapeake colonies. Her span of seventy years carried her from the unsettled middle of the seventeenth century, when Maryland was still a young proprietary colony under the Calverts, to the more established provincial society of the early eighteenth century.

She was the daughter of Robert Love (1628–1675) and Sarah Bond (1633–1692), both of whom had cast their fortunes with the Maryland settlements. Tamar's birth in 1651 placed her among the first generation of English-descended children native to the colony. The Maryland of her girlhood was a tobacco country of scattered plantations along the bay and its tidal rivers, where colonial households depended upon the labor of the land, the rhythm of shipping, and the slow building of parishes and county courts. Religious tensions between Catholic and Protestant settlers shaped public life throughout her childhood and youth.

Tamar was united in marriage to William Hunter Wilkinson, with whom she made her home in the Baltimore County region. Of their union is recorded a daughter, Anna Wilkinson (1705–1774), who continued the family line and through whom Tamar's descent flowed into the generations that followed. That Anna was born when Tamar was in her fifties is noteworthy and suggests the possibility of other children, though only Anna is documented in the present record.

Tamar died in Baltimore in 1722 and was thus among the colonial Maryland forebears whose lives anchor the deep ancestry of the family. She stands as a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.