JANE NICHOLS

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Nichols (1808–1888), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Kentucky birth, parentage in the Nichols and Jackson families, marriage to David Stutsman, and motherhood. Notable: her union with the Stutsman line, of likely Mennonite heritage, and her early frontier Kentucky origins.

Jane Nichols was born on the twenty-first day of April, 1808, in Nelson County, Kentucky, in the still-young commonwealth that had only sixteen years prior been admitted to the Union. She entered the world as a daughter of James Thaddeus Nichols (1762–1824) and Rachel Sargent Jackson (1774–1856), in a household shaped by the rhythms of early Kentucky settlement. Nelson County in that era was a region of rolling farmland and modest agricultural homesteads, settled largely by families who had pressed westward from Virginia and Maryland in the decades following the Revolution.

Jane was a child of sixteen when her father James passed in 1824, and her mother Rachel would survive into the year 1856, living a long widowhood that spanned much of Jane's own adult life. The family connections to the Sargent and Jackson lines extended Jane's heritage across several streams of early American settlement.

In the course of her young womanhood, Jane was joined in marriage to David Stutsman, a union that brought together the Nichols family with the Stutsman line, the latter carrying the inheritance of Mennonite tradition descended from German-speaking Anabaptists who had crossed the Atlantic in the colonial period and settled westward through Pennsylvania and Ohio into the western country. Of this marriage there came at least one son recorded in the family register: Jerimiah Nicholas Stutsman, born in 1830, who would live until 1901 and through whom the lineage descended to the compiler.

Jane lived through a remarkable span of the nation's history — from the years of Jefferson's presidency, through the upheavals of the Civil War, and into the industrial age of the late nineteenth century. She passed from this life in 1888, having reached the age of eighty years, a longevity uncommon for women of her generation.

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