Jane Young

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Young (1775–1856), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, her maternal parentage, her marriage to Joseph McKee, and her recorded daughter Sarah. Notable: a life lived entirely within the Allegheny–Kiskiminetas frontier region of western Pennsylvania across the Early Republic era.

Jane Young (1775–1856) was born in the Allegheny–Kiskiminetas country of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, in the very year that the colonies' quarrel with Britain hardened into open war. The region of her birth — at the confluence of the Kiskiminetas with the Allegheny River — lay then on the still-contested western frontier of Pennsylvania, a landscape of small farmsteads, river trade, and scattered Scots-Irish and German settlement. Into this rough country Jane was born to Anna Annes Potter (1741–1815), and within its bounds she would live out the full span of her eighty-one years.

Of her childhood and youth the family register preserves no particulars, though the era itself spoke loudly: she came of age during the Whiskey Rebellion years of the 1790s, when the farmers of western Pennsylvania resisted the federal excise, and she reached adulthood as the new American republic took its first uncertain steps. In due course Jane was married to Joseph McKee, joining her line with one of the McKee families established in the region. Of this union the archive records a daughter, Sarah McKee (1799–1888), born at the close of the eighteenth century, who in her own long life would carry the line forward into the post–Civil War decades.

Jane lived to witness extraordinary transformation in her corner of Pennsylvania: the coming of canals along the Kiskiminetas, the rise of the iron and coal trades in Armstrong County, the slow conversion of frontier clearings into settled farming communities, and the great westward migrations of her neighbors' children. She herself remained rooted. She died in 1856 at Plum Creek, Armstrong County — within the same county in which she had been born — on the eve of the sectional crisis that would consume the nation she had seen founded.

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