William A Hawkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William A Hawkins (1779–1851), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Pennsylvania birth, marriage to Abigail McVey, his daughter Harriet Laura Hawkins, his death in Hendricks County, Indiana, and the westward migration era of the early American republic.

William A Hawkins (1779–1851) entered the world on the 31st of March, 1779, in Fayette City, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the closing years of the American Revolution. His birthplace, set along the Monongahela River in the southwestern reaches of Pennsylvania, lay at the very threshold of the young nation's westward frontier — a region then populated by farmers, river tradesmen, and veterans of the late war drawn by the promise of fertile land.

William came of age in a period of profound national expansion. The decades following his birth saw the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and a steady migration of Pennsylvania families across the Ohio River into the new states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. William's own life traced this very current, for although he was born in Pennsylvania, he ended his days in Indiana — a journey westward shared by countless families of his generation.

He was united in marriage to Abigail McVey, also rendered McVay in some records, a surname of Scots-Irish origin common among the settlers of the trans-Appalachian frontier. From their union came a daughter, Harriet Laura Hawkins, born in 1817 and destined for a long life of her own, surviving until 1905. Through Harriet the Hawkins line would descend into the families that ultimately joined the broader pedigree recorded in this archive.

William A Hawkins died on the 18th of December, 1851, in Danville, Hendricks County, Indiana, at the age of seventy-two. Hendricks County, organized only in 1824, was in his last years still a relatively young community of farms and small towns west of Indianapolis, settled in considerable part by migrants from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. His death there marked the completion of a life that had carried him from the eastern hills of his birth to the open agricultural country of the Old Northwest.

William was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.