Thomas N Hyten

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas N Hyten (1841–1901), a 3× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Indiana birth, parentage, marriage to Julia F Pounds, his son Oscar, his death in Danville, and Civil War–era Indiana context. Notable: born to an older father (William Caywood Hyten was 51 at his birth); came of age during the Civil War.

Thomas N Hyten (1841–1901) was born on the nineteenth of November, 1841, in Indiana, the son of William Caywood Hyten (1790–1882) and Elizabeth, called Eliza, Darnall (1802–1876). He entered the world late in his father's life, William having been some fifty-one years of age at his son's birth — a circumstance not uncommon in frontier families, where second marriages and long-lived patriarchs frequently produced children well into the parents' middle and later years.

Thomas's boyhood was spent in an Indiana still bearing the marks of the frontier. The state, admitted to the Union only a generation earlier in 1816, was during the 1840s and 1850s rapidly transitioning from pioneer settlement to established agricultural community, with rail lines reaching into Hendricks County and the surrounding region. He came of age precisely as the sectional crisis broke into civil war; men of his birth year stood squarely within the age-cohort called to service in the Union armies between 1861 and 1865, though the present record does not document his particular participation.

Thomas was joined in marriage to Julia F Pounds, and of this union there is recorded at least one son, Oscar O Hyten (1866–1949), born when Thomas was twenty-four years of age. Through Oscar the line would continue forward into the twentieth century and ultimately to the compiler.

The latter decades of Thomas's life unfolded in the post-bellum Indiana of reconstruction, agricultural expansion, and the slow industrialization of the small county seats. He died on the thirteenth of November, 1901, in Danville, Indiana, six days short of his sixtieth birthday. Danville, the seat of Hendricks County, lay at the heart of the region long associated with the Hyten family's Indiana settlement.

Thomas N Hyten was the compiler's third great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as the link between the long-lived pioneer generation of William Caywood Hyten and the twentieth-century descendants who would carry the name forward.