Harriet Laura Hawkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Harriet Laura Hawkins (1817–1905), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Kentucky birth, parentage in the Hawkins-McVey union, marriage to Henry Albert Pounds, motherhood, eventual settling in Iowa, and the era context of westward migration through the Ohio Valley into the Upper Midwest during the nineteenth century.

Harriet Laura Hawkins (1817–1905) was born on the 27th of October 1817 in Kentucky, the daughter of William A. Hawkins (1779–1851) and Abigail McVey, sometimes recorded McVay (1788–1872). She entered the world during a period when Kentucky, admitted to the Union only a quarter-century earlier, was still a frontier of small farms, cleared woodlands, and tightly bound kin networks tracing their roots eastward to Virginia and the Carolinas. The Hawkins-McVey household belonged to that generation of Upland South families whose lives were measured by season, soil, and the slow westward turn of the American interior.

Harriet was joined in marriage to Henry Albert Pounds, and of that union is recorded a daughter, Julia F. Pounds, born in 1847 and departing this life in 1881 at the age of thirty-four — a sorrow Harriet, then in her sixties, lived to bear. Whether other children blessed the marriage is not herein established, but the line carried forward through Julia.

In the decades following her marriage, Harriet's household joined the great current of migration from Kentucky northwestward into the prairie states. By the close of her long life she was settled in the small Iowa County town of Millersburg, a community that had grown up amid the rolling farmland of east-central Iowa in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There, on the 5th of February 1905, Harriet Laura Hawkins died at the venerable age of eighty-seven, having outlived her parents by more than half a century, her husband, and her only known child.

Her years spanned an extraordinary arc of American life — from the presidency of James Monroe to that of Theodore Roosevelt, from flatboat and ox-team to railroad and telegraph. Harriet was the compiler's 4× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.