Alexander Henderson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alexander Henderson (1810–1911), a 4× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Guilford County, North Carolina, his parentage, his marriage to Isabella Chapman, his daughter Amanda, his long life spanning a full century, and era context. Notable: Quaker-corridor migration from Guilford County, NC to Montgomery County, Indiana; lifespan of 100 years bridging the early Republic and the modern era.

Alexander Henderson (1810–1911) entered the world on the sixth of September, 1810, in Guilford County, North Carolina, the son of James Alexander Henderson (1796–1838) and Rebecca Thomas (d. 1828). His birthplace lay in the heart of the North Carolina Piedmont, a region settled in considerable part by Quaker and Scots-Irish families whose religious convictions and discomfort with the institution of slavery would, in the decades surrounding Alexander's youth, send a steady stream of households northward into the free soil of Indiana and Ohio. The Hendersons of Guilford County stood within that broader migratory current, and Alexander's own life would in time trace its arc.

His early years were marked by sorrow. His mother Rebecca died in 1828, when Alexander was but seventeen, and his father James followed her to the grave in 1838. By the close of that decade Alexander stood as a young man bereft of both parents, of an age and circumstance well suited to seek his fortune elsewhere.

He married Isabella Chapman, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Amanda Henderson (1843–1927), through whom the line descended to the compiler. The family ultimately settled at Coal Creek, in Montgomery County, Indiana — a community in the west-central portion of the state whose mid-nineteenth-century population owed much to migrants drawn out of the Carolinas along the well-worn paths through Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.

Alexander's life was of remarkable length. Born during the presidency of James Madison and in the closing months before the War of 1812, he lived to witness the rise and fall of the antebellum order, the Civil War, the long transformations of Reconstruction and industrialization, and the dawn of the twentieth century. He died at Coal Creek on the twenty-ninth of March, 1911, having attained the venerable age of one hundred years.

Alexander Henderson was the compiler's 4× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.