Abigail McVey (McVay)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Abigail McVey (McVay) (1788–1872), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Greenbrier County in present-day West Virginia, her parentage, her marriage to William A. Hawkins, her daughter Harriet Laura Hawkins, her death in Boone County, Indiana, and era context concerning the westward migration of Virginia families into the Old Northwest.

Abigail McVey, also rendered McVay in some records, was born on the 15th of January 1788 in Greenbrier County, in the mountainous western reaches of Virginia that would later become the state of West Virginia. She was a daughter of Sergeant John McVey (1737–1823), whose military rank suggests service in the era of the American Revolution or the frontier conflicts that followed, a common distinction among the hardy Scots-Irish and English settlers who pressed into the Greenbrier valley in the late eighteenth century.

That region, in the years surrounding Abigail's birth, was a rugged borderland of small farms, dispersed settlements, and Presbyterian and Methodist meetinghouses, where households depended upon kin networks for survival, schooling, and the ordinary sacraments of frontier life. It was from such a world that Abigail came of age.

She was united in marriage to William A. Hawkins, and from that union came at least one recorded daughter, Harriet Laura Hawkins, born in 1817 and living to the venerable age of eighty-eight in 1905. Through Harriet, the McVey and Hawkins blood was carried forward into the Hyten line.

Like many Virginia-born families of her generation, Abigail eventually removed westward, following the great current of migration that drew Upland Southerners across the Ohio River into Indiana during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Boone County, Indiana, where she ended her days, had been organized in 1830 and was settled rapidly by families seeking fresh agricultural ground in the central Indiana prairies and woodlands.

Abigail died there on the 18th of March 1872, having lived eighty-four years — a span reaching from the early presidency of George Washington nearly to the centennial of the Republic. She had witnessed the founding generation, the westward expansion, and the trial of civil war.

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