*Anastasia "Stacia" Robey Worland Warnell*

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anastasia 'Stacia' Robey Worland Warnell (c. 1630–unknown), a tenth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her English birth, colonial migration to Maryland, marriage to John Warnell, her daughter Katherine, and the early Chesapeake context. Notable: surname carries an unverified Ancestry hint, transatlantic migration to the Maryland colony, and a daughter reputed to have lived a full century.

Anastasia Robey Worland Warnell, familiarly called Stacia, was born about the year 1630 in England, in the closing years of the reign of Charles I. The exact parish of her nativity has not been preserved in the family papers, and the surname Worland itself appears in the records with an asterisk — that is, as an unverified hint drawn from Ancestry's suggestion system rather than from a documented source. This caveat is set down here in candor, so that future descendants may weigh the line accordingly and pursue further proof.

At some point in her earlier years Stacia crossed the Atlantic to the British colony of Maryland, where so many English settlers of her generation were drawn by the promise of tobacco lands and the comparative religious tolerance offered under the Calvert proprietorship. Maryland in the mid-seventeenth century was still a sparsely settled tidewater colony, its inhabitants clustered along the inlets of the Chesapeake and dependent upon English shipping for nearly every manufactured necessity. Charles County, on the lower Potomac, was organized in 1658 and became a region of modest plantations worked by indentured servants and, increasingly, by enslaved labor.

In this colonial setting she became the wife of John Warnell. Of their household little has come down to us, but one daughter is recorded: Katherine Warnell, born in 1645, who according to family tradition lived to the remarkable age of one hundred years, her span reaching from 1645 to 1745. If accurate, Katherine's life bridged the founding generation of the Maryland colony and the eve of the colonial wars that would precede American independence.

The place and date of Stacia's death are not known. She is presumed to have died in Charles County, Maryland, but no marker, will, or parish record has yet been located to confirm the year of her passing.

Anastasia stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a tenth-great-grandmother.