Richard Jones 8gg

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Jones (1651–1714), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Anne Arundel, Maryland, his father Richard G. Jones II, his daughter Anne Jones, and historical context regarding colonial Maryland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Notable: deep colonial-Maryland roots.

Richard Jones (1651–1714) was born in Anne Arundel County in the Province of Maryland, and there, in the same county that had shaped his whole life, he died on the thirtieth day of March, 1714, at the age of sixty-three. His was a life bounded entirely by the tidewater country along the western shore of the Chesapeake, in a colony then less than two decades older than himself.

He was the son of Richard G. Jones, II (1610–1683), an earlier settler whose own lifespan reached back into the first generation of Maryland's English settlement. To be born in Anne Arundel in 1651 was to enter a society still raw and forming: the county itself had been organized only the previous year, in 1650, to accommodate the Puritan and Protestant migrants who had moved down from Virginia and settled along the Severn River. Through the decades of Richard's life, that region grew from a frontier of scattered plantations into a settled tobacco country, gathering itself around the new provincial capital at Annapolis, which was established in 1694 and would have stood as the chief town of his maturity.

The latter half of the seventeenth century in Maryland was a turbulent era — marked by the conflict between the Calvert proprietors and the Protestant majority, by the Glorious Revolution's echo in the 1689 overthrow of the Proprietary government, and by the establishment of royal rule and the Anglican Church. Richard lived through all of these transitions, dying in the early years of the reign of Queen Anne's successor.

Among his children was Anne Jones (1700–1741), through whom this line of descent continues; she stands in the family record as a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler.

Richard Jones was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, a deep colonial root reaching back into the founding generations of Maryland.