Joseph McKee

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Joseph McKee (1753–1851), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Ulster, transatlantic migration to Pennsylvania, parentage, marriage to Jane Young, daughter Sarah, and his long life spanning nearly a century. Notable: Scots-Irish origins in County Tyrone and settlement in frontier western Pennsylvania.

Joseph McKee (1753–1851) was born on the third of October, 1753, in the parish of Derryloran at Cookstown in County Tyrone, in the northern province of Ireland then under the British crown. He was a son of James McKee (1735–1794), and entered the world among the Scots-Irish Presbyterian community that had populated Ulster since the seventeenth-century plantations. The Cookstown of Joseph's youth was a linen-weaving market town, and the broader region in the mid-eighteenth century was marked by rising rents, periodic agricultural distress, and a steady current of emigration toward the American colonies — a current that, in time, would carry Joseph himself across the Atlantic.

In the course of his long life Joseph married Jane Young, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Sarah McKee (1799–1888), through whom his line descended to later generations of the family. The decades of his adulthood encompassed the American Revolution, the founding of the Republic, the War of 1812, the westward push across the Alleghenies, and the early industrial transformation of Pennsylvania — a remarkable sweep of history for a single lifetime.

Joseph died on the first of August, 1851, at Plum Creek in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, having attained the venerable age of ninety-seven years. Armstrong County, situated in the rolling country along the Allegheny River northeast of Pittsburgh, had been organized in 1800 and was settled in considerable measure by Scots-Irish families of Presbyterian inclination, among whom the McKees took their place. That Joseph lived to so advanced an age, and was laid to rest in the soil of western Pennsylvania, attests both to the hardihood of his constitution and to the successful transplanting of his family from the Ulster of his birth to the American frontier of his maturity.

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