JAMES Thaddeus Nichols

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James Thaddeus Nichols (1762–1824), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Pennsylvania colonial birth, parentage, marriage to Rachel Sargent Jackson, his daughter Jane, his death in Hendricks County, Indiana, and the Revolutionary-era and frontier-migration context that shaped his generation.

James Thaddeus Nichols (1762–1824) was born on the first of June, 1762, in the Colony of Pennsylvania, then still under British rule. He entered the world on the eve of revolutionary upheaval, the son of James Thaddeus Nichols (1737–1810) and Elizabeth Mary Greene (1739–1814), and he carried his father's name forward into the new republic that would be forged during his boyhood years. Pennsylvania in the 1760s was a colony marked by religious pluralism, prosperous farmland, and an unusually diverse mixture of English, German, Welsh, and Scots-Irish settlers; the Nichols household took its place among those colonial families whose lives would be reshaped by the coming Revolution and the westward currents that followed.

In the course of his life James married Rachel Sargent Jackson, his companion through the unsettled decades that followed American independence. Of their union is recorded a daughter, Jane Nichols (1808–1888), who would in time carry the family's lineage forward into the nineteenth century. The relatively late date of Jane's birth, when James was already in his mid-forties, hints at a long married life, though the archive preserves the name of only this one child.

At some point during the great migrations that drew Pennsylvania families across the Ohio country and into the new states of the trans-Appalachian West, James removed to Indiana. Indiana had been admitted to the Union only in 1816, and Hendricks County, organized in 1824, was at the very edge of frontier settlement when he died there on the 24th of December, 1824, at the age of sixty-two. His passing came in the county's earliest months of formal existence, placing him among its first generation of settlers and decedents.

James Thaddeus Nichols was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather along the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.