John Grenard

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Grenard (1799–1867), a 4× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Kentucky birth, parentage, marriage, son Elisha, death in Indiana, and the broader era context of the Kentucky-to-Indiana migration in the early nineteenth century.

John Grenard (1799–1867) was born on the 23rd of October, 1799, in Fleming County, Kentucky, then a frontier district of the young Commonwealth scarcely a decade removed from its admission to the Union. He was the son of William Grenard (1776–1835) and Elle Milly 'Ellen' Price (1782–1844), a couple of the early Kentucky settlement generation whose household took root amid the rolling country east of the Bluegrass.

Kentucky in the opening years of the nineteenth century remained a land of recent clearings and forming communities, where families newly arrived from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas pressed westward in search of land and livelihood. It was in this setting that John passed his early years, coming of age in a generation that would, in great numbers, continue the westward movement across the Ohio River into the developing states of the Old Northwest.

In the course of his adult life, John was united in marriage to Desire Tracy, who became Desire Tracy Grenard. Of their union the record preserves a son, Elisha Grenard, born in 1827 and living until 1883. Whether other children blessed the household, the family register does not here record.

Like a great many Kentuckians of his generation, John Grenard removed northward into Indiana, a passage well-trodden by families of the Ohio Valley as the new state opened its prairies and woodlands to settlement following 1816. He closed his days in Montgomery County, Indiana, where he died on the 25th of December, 1867, at the age of sixty-eight, the Christmas Day of that year marking his passing in the months following the close of the great national conflict.

John Grenard stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a fourth-great-grandfather, his life bridging the frontier Kentucky of his birth and the settled Indiana farmland of his death.