MARGARET B. PEGGY LOIS JOHNSON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret B. 'Peggy' Lois Johnson (1796–1856), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Chatham County, North Carolina, her mother Elizabeth Wilkerson, her marriage to Lewis Tune Pounds, her son Henry Albert Pounds, and her death in Hendricks County, Indiana. Notable: she is part of the well-documented Carolina-to-Indiana migration that brought many families into Hendricks County in the early nineteenth century.

Margaret B. Johnson, known affectionately within the family as Peggy Lois, was born on the 8th of October 1796 in Chatham County, North Carolina, and departed this life on the 13th of April 1856 in Hendricks County, Indiana, having lived a span of nearly sixty years that bridged the early Republic and the years leading up to the American Civil War. She was the daughter of Elizabeth 'Betty' Wilkerson (1760–1838), through whom she inherited her place among the Carolina-born forebears of the family.

Chatham County in the closing years of the eighteenth century lay in the rolling Piedmont of North Carolina, a region of small farms, modest meeting-houses, and tightly woven kinship networks. Many families of that district — including a number who would in time become connected by marriage to the Johnsons — were swept up in the great westward migration of the early nineteenth century, when the opening of the Old Northwest drew Carolinians by the wagonload into Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Hendricks County, Indiana, where Peggy would end her days, was organized in 1824 and became a particular destination for such transplanted Carolina households.

Peggy was united in marriage to Lewis Tune Pounds, and from that union came at least one son recorded in the family register, Henry Albert Pounds (1821–1893), who carried the line forward into the latter half of the nineteenth century. The transit of the family from the red-clay country of Chatham to the prairies and hardwood groves of central Indiana mirrors the experience of countless households of her generation, who exchanged the older settled regions of the seaboard for the promise of new ground in the interior.

Margaret B. 'Peggy' Lois Johnson rests in Hendricks County, Indiana, far from the place of her birth. She was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.