Robert Love

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Robert Love (1628–1675), a tenth great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English origins in Northamptonshire, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage to Sarah Bond, his daughter Tamar Love, and historical context of the early Chesapeake. Notable: among the archive's earliest seventeenth-century English emigrant ancestors.

Robert Love, born in 1628 in the parish of Castor in Northamptonshire, England, stands among the earliest seventeenth-century forebears preserved in the Hyten family archive. His life bridged two worlds — the settled agricultural countryside of central England, where he entered the world during the reign of Charles I, and the still-raw colonial frontier of Chesapeake Maryland, where he would close his days. The decades of his youth were turbulent ones in England: civil war, the execution of the king, the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the Restoration of 1660 all unfolded during his early and middle adulthood, and any one of these upheavals may help explain the broader migratory currents that carried Englishmen of his generation across the Atlantic.

Robert married Sarah Bond, and of their union the archive preserves the record of a daughter, Tamar Love, born in 1651 and living until 1722. Through Tamar the line descends into the compiler's paternal-grandfather branch. The proximity of Tamar's birth year to the period when Robert was establishing himself in the New World suggests that the family's transatlantic transition occurred during the middle years of the seventeenth century, an era when the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake was drawing English settlers in considerable numbers to the shores of the Patapsco and the Severn.

Robert Love died on the seventh of May, 1675, in Baltimore, Maryland — then a sparsely settled county on the northern Chesapeake whose namesake town had not yet been founded. He was forty-seven years of age. Maryland in 1675 was a proprietary colony under the Calvert family, governed by a precarious balance of Catholic proprietorship and a largely Protestant population, and life expectancy on the tidewater frontier was famously short owing to malaria and the hardships of plantation life.

Robert was the compiler's tenth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather line, and one of the deepest English roots documented in the Hyten archive.