Reginald Reynold ('Agnes'\ Immigrant) Jenkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Reginald Reynold Jenkins (1608–1683), known by the immigrant designation tied to the ship 'Agnes,' a 10× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his English birth in Devonshire, his mother Abigail Follett, his marriage to Ann Gale, his son Jabez, and his death at York, Maine. Notable: early colonial immigrant to Massachusetts Bay.

Reginald Reynold Jenkins, distinguished in family memory by the immigrant designation associated with the ship Agnes, was born on the 29th of June, 1608, in the seafaring parish of Dartmouth and Kingswear in Devonshire, England. He was the son of Abigail Follett, who died in 1610, leaving him motherless in his earliest infancy. The Devon coast of his birth was in that era a busy mariners' country, its harbors sending vessels to the fisheries of Newfoundland and to the nascent English settlements along the New England shore — a context that helps explain the westward course Reginald himself would in time follow.

Reginald crossed the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the great wave of English emigration that defined the second quarter of the seventeenth century, a period when Puritan and West-Country settlers alike sought new footing along the rugged coast of what is now Maine. He married Ann Gale, herself remembered in the family record as an immigrant of the same generation, and together they established their household in York, in the county of York, then under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay. The frontier town of York in those decades was a small but determined settlement of fishermen, farmers, and traders, exposed to the hardships of coastal weather and the uncertainties of relations with the native peoples of the region.

From the union of Reginald and Ann came their son Jabez H. Jenkins, born in 1655 and surviving his father by some fourteen years before his own death in 1697. Through Jabez the Jenkins line descended forward into succeeding generations.

Reginald Reynold Jenkins died on the 23rd of July, 1683, in York, having reached the considerable age of seventy-five — a longevity uncommon for the colonial frontier of his day. He stands in the compiler's pedigree as a 10× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.