RACHEL Sargent Jackson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rachel Sargent Jackson (1774–1856), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Pennsylvania birth, parentage, marriage to James Thaddeus Nichols, her daughter Jane Nichols, and her death in Hendricks County, Indiana. Notable: her life spanned the founding of the American Republic through the eve of the Civil War, and her family's westward migration into central Indiana.

Rachel Sargent Jackson (1774–1856) was born on the twelfth day of April, 1774, in Pennsylvania, into a colony soon to be reshaped by revolution. She was the daughter of Andrew Harryman Jackson (1754–1837) and Elizabeth Nancy Sargent (1754–1782), her mother having died when Rachel was a child of but eight years. To enter the world in 1774 was to come of age alongside the young Republic itself — her infancy passed amid the upheaval of the War of Independence, her girlhood under the new federal Constitution, and her womanhood in the era of westward settlement that drew so many Pennsylvania families across the Ohio country into the Indiana frontier.

In time Rachel was united in marriage to James Thaddeus Nichols. Of this union there is preserved the record of a daughter, Jane Nichols, born in 1808 and living until 1888 — a long life that carried the family memory forward into the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Through Jane the line descended toward the compiler of this register.

Rachel's later years were spent in Hendricks County, Indiana, a region settled in the 1820s and 1830s by families pressing westward from Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Ohio. The county, organized in 1824 and named for Governor William Hendricks, was largely agrarian during her residence there, its woodlands giving way slowly to farmsteads and small market villages. Whether Rachel removed there in her middle years or in widowhood is not here recorded, but it was upon that Indiana soil that her long life drew to its close.

She died on the twenty-first day of January, 1856, at the age of eighty-one years and nine months — having outlived her father by nearly two decades and witnessed the passing of the founding generation into history. Rachel was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.