Sarah Bond

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Bond (1633–1692), a tenth great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Maryland, her marriage to Robert Love, her daughter Tamar Love, and the broader context of seventeenth-century Baltimore County. Notable: among the earliest colonial-era ancestors documented in this register.

Sarah Bond (1633–1692) stands among the earliest of the colonial forebears recorded in this register, her life unfolding entirely within the bounds of seventeenth-century Baltimore County, Maryland, where she was both born and, fifty-nine years later, laid to rest. She occupies a place ten generations removed from the compiler along the paternal-grandfather line, a quiet but essential link in the long chain of descent traced through these pages.

The Maryland of Sarah's birth in 1633 was itself in its infancy. The colony had been chartered only the year before by Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, and the first English settlers were establishing themselves along the Chesapeake tidewater. Baltimore County, where Sarah's life played out, was a frontier of tobacco plantations, scattered farmsteads, and small landings along the rivers feeding the bay. Settlement was sparse, communication slow, and the rhythms of life governed by harvest, weather, and the ever-present negotiations between English settlers, the Susquehannock and Piscataway peoples, and the colonial proprietors. Religious tolerance, uncommon elsewhere in the English colonies, was a defining feature of early Maryland and shaped the social texture of the world Sarah inhabited.

Sarah was joined in marriage to Robert Love, and of their union there is recorded a daughter, Tamar Love, born in 1651 and surviving until 1722. Tamar, in her turn, would carry the family line forward into the eighteenth century, and through her the thread continues unbroken down to the compiler. That Sarah bore Tamar at the age of eighteen places her marriage and motherhood within the customary patterns of colonial Maryland, where households were established young and the labor of women was indispensable to the survival of frontier homesteads.

Sarah died in 1692 in the same county that had been her lifelong home. She was a tenth great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.