Alice Marie Hendricks

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alice Marie Hendricks (1883–1966), a 2× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Montgomery, Indiana, her parentage in the Hendricks-Henderson union, her marriage to Joseph Maroni Grenard, her daughter Julia, and her death in Indianapolis. Notable: Hendricks/Henderson lineage with probable Quaker migratory roots from North Carolina into Indiana.

Alice Marie Hendricks was born in 1883 in Montgomery, Indiana, the daughter of James Wesley Hendricks (1838–1912) and Amanda Henderson (1843–1927). Her arrival came near the close of the post-Civil War decades, a period in which south-central Indiana was settling into a rhythm of small farming communities, country churches, and modest market towns. The Hendricks and Henderson surnames in this region commonly trace to the great Quaker migration of the early nineteenth century, which carried families out of the Carolinas and into the free soil of Indiana — a movement that shaped much of the religious and civic character of the counties in which Alice was raised.

She came of age in the 1890s and early 1900s, an era in which Indiana farm daughters customarily balanced household labor, schooling where available, and the social rounds of church and extended kin. In due course Alice was united in marriage with Joseph Maroni Grenard, joining the Hendricks line to the Grenard household. Of this union there is recorded a daughter, Julia A. Grenard, born in 1906, who in time would carry the line forward through her marriage into the Hyten family — a turning point of significance for the compiler's own descent.

Alice outlived both of her parents by many decades, witnessing in her own lifetime the passing of the agrarian nineteenth-century world into the urban and industrial twentieth. By her later years she had removed from the small-town setting of her birth to Indianapolis, the state capital and largest city of Marion County, where a great many Indiana families of her generation eventually gathered as their children pursued work and opportunity in the city.

She died in January 1966 in Indianapolis, having reached the age of eighty-two or eighty-three. Alice Marie Hendricks was a 2× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as the maternal grandmother of the compiler's paternal grandfather through her daughter Julia.