Mary Elizabeth Tune

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Elizabeth Tune (1756–1846), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Virginia birth, her parentage in the Tune family, her marriage to William H. Pound, her son Lewis Tune Pounds, her long life spanning ninety years, and the Revolutionary-era Virginia and antebellum North Carolina context surrounding her.

Mary Elizabeth Tune (1756–1846) was born on the nineteenth of April, 1756, in Mecklenburg, Virginia, a county seated along the southern border of the colony in the years immediately preceding the French and Indian War's conclusion and the long unrest that would culminate in American independence. She was the daughter of James Traverse Tune, sometimes recorded as Travenor and known familiarly as Travis (1731–1825), and of Amanda Carry, born in 1725. Mecklenburg County in the mid-eighteenth century was a region of tobacco plantations, modest yeoman farms, and a population steadily pressing westward and southward, and it was into this Anglo-Virginian world that Mary entered as a young girl on the eve of revolution.

She came of age during the years of the War for Independence, a period in which the rural Virginia and Carolina backcountry was deeply contested ground between Patriot militias and Loyalist forces. In due course Mary married William H. Pound, a union from which descended at least one recorded son, Lewis Tune Pounds (1792–1878), whose middle name preserved the maternal family surname — a customary practice of the period by which mothers' lines were quietly honored in the naming of children.

Mary's later life unfolded in Chatham County, North Carolina, where the family, like many Virginians of that generation, had relocated southward across the colonial border into the rolling piedmont country. She lived to the remarkable age of ninety, dying on the fourth of September, 1846, in Chatham, having witnessed in the course of her long life the colonial era, the Revolution, the founding of the Republic, the War of 1812, and the early decades of antebellum America.

Mary Elizabeth Tune was a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.