Richard James

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard James (1649–1685), a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage, issue, and the historical context of the early Chesapeake colony. Notable: he represents the family's 17th-century English origins and its early presence in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

Richard James (1649–1685) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, ranking as a 9× great-grandfather. He was born in April of 1649 at Canterbury, in the county of Dorset, England, into a kingdom freshly convulsed by civil war; the very year of his birth saw the execution of King Charles I and the establishment of the short-lived Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. It was an England of upheaval, religious dispute, and a steady outward current of emigration toward the New World.

At some point in his relatively brief life, Richard removed himself from the English shore to the Province of Maryland, then a proprietary colony under the Calvert family. He settled in Anne Arundel County, a region established in the 1650s along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay and named for the wife of the second Lord Baltimore. The county, founded in part by Puritan settlers welcomed under Maryland's policy of religious toleration, was by Richard's time a thriving tobacco-growing district whose tidewater plantations were knit together by waterways rather than roads.

In Maryland, Richard James married Eleanor Honor Orme, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Mary Jane James, born in 1680. Mary Jane would in time live to 1747, carrying her father's line forward into the eighteenth century and onward, eventually, into the broader Hyten ancestry.

Richard James died on the 18th of April, 1685, in Anne Arundel County, having attained only his thirty-sixth year. Such foreshortened lives were unhappily common among the first generation of Chesapeake settlers, whose mortality from fever and the rigors of colonial labor was severe. He left behind a young daughter and a widow to continue the family's foothold in the New World.

Richard was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.