Josiah Hyten

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Josiah Hyten (1769–1816), a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maryland, parentage, marriage to Rebecca Caywood, his son William Caywood Hyten, and death in Kentucky. Notable: born on the eve of the American Revolution; part of the westward Hyten migration from Maryland into the Kentucky frontier.

Josiah Hyten (1769–1816) was born in Laurel, in the Province of Maryland, six years before the outbreak of the American Revolution. He was the son of Joseph Hyten, born in 1731, and Priscilla Ann Caywood (1748–1830), and he entered the world during a period when the Maryland colony stood on the threshold of profound political upheaval. The Hyten household, like many in the Chesapeake region of that decade, would have witnessed the colony's transformation from royal province to constituent state of the new American republic during Josiah's earliest years.

In the course of his adult life, Josiah married Rebecca Caywood, joining once more the Caywood family with which his mother's line was already entwined. Such intermarriage between allied families was characteristic of late-eighteenth-century rural America, where kinship networks anchored communities through migration and settlement. To this union was born at least one recorded son, William Caywood Hyten (1790–1882), whose long life would carry the Hyten name well into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Josiah died about 1816 in Montgomery County, Kentucky, having removed at some point from his Maryland birthplace to the trans-Appalachian frontier. The Kentucky country in those decades was a magnet for families departing the older Atlantic settlements; opened to broad American migration after the Revolution and granted statehood in 1792, it drew Marylanders, Virginians, and Pennsylvanians westward along the Wilderness Road and the Ohio River. That Josiah ended his days in Montgomery County situates him among that generation of pioneer settlers who carved homesteads and county seats out of the Bluegrass interior in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He was forty-seven years old at the time of his death.

Josiah Hyten was a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.