Elizabeth Betty Wilkerson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth 'Betty' Wilkerson (1760–1838), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Pennsylvania, her parentage, her death in North Carolina, and her recorded daughter. Notable: born on the eve of the American Revolution; reflects the Pennsylvania-to-Carolina migration pattern common among 18th-century frontier families.

Elizabeth Wilkerson, known within the family records as Betty, was born in 1760 in Paxtang Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and departed this life on the 16th of November, 1838, in Randolph County, North Carolina. Her seventy-eight years of life spanned one of the most consequential periods in the history of the young republic, from the closing years of British colonial rule through the early decades of the American nation.

She was the daughter of John Wilkerson, born about 1730, and of Mercy Deadman, who lived from 1735 to 1810. The Wilkerson household in Paxtang Township stood within a region of Pennsylvania that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had become a meeting ground of Scots-Irish, German, and English settlers pressing westward along the Susquehanna frontier. The township in which Betty entered the world had, only a few years prior to her birth, been touched by the violence of the French and Indian War, and her earliest childhood unfolded amid the gathering tensions that would culminate in the Revolution.

At some point in her life, Betty removed from the Pennsylvania country of her birth to Randolph County in the Piedmont of North Carolina, a migration consistent with the broader southward movement of Pennsylvania families along the Great Wagon Road during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Many such families settled in the rolling country of the North Carolina backcountry, where land was abundant and communities of dissenting Protestants — Quakers, Moravians, and others — had established themselves.

The family register preserves the name of one daughter, Margaret B., called Peggy, who married into the Johnson family and lived from 1796 until 1856. Through this daughter, the Wilkerson line was carried forward into succeeding generations of the compiler's paternal kin.

Elizabeth 'Betty' Wilkerson stood as a sixth-great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line.