Sergeant John McVey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sergeant John McVey (1737–1823), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, parentage, military rank, transatlantic resettlement, his daughter Abigail, and era context for 18th-century Scots emigration to colonial Virginia. Notable: born in Edinburgh, held the rank of Sergeant, died in Franklin, Virginia.

Sergeant John McVey (1737–1823) stands among the earliest Scottish-born forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a 6× great-grandparent whose long life spanned the closing decades of colonial America and the early years of the young Republic. He was born in 1737 in Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland, the son of William McVey (1695–1762) and Margaret Byrne McClure-McVey (1715–1743). The loss of his mother before his sixth year would have shaped his earliest household, as it did so many in that century when maternal mortality remained a constant companion to Scottish family life.

Edinburgh in the mid-eighteenth century was a city in the throes of transformation, its Old Town crowded and its university rising as a seat of the Scottish Enlightenment. It was also a city overshadowed by the political tumult of the Jacobite risings, particularly the rebellion of 1745, which unfolded when John was a boy of eight. In the decades following, waves of Scots and Scots-Irish emigrants crossed the Atlantic in search of land and steadier prospects, settling especially through the Virginia backcountry and the Appalachian frontier.

John McVey was among those who made the crossing, and he carried with him, or earned in the New World, the rank of Sergeant — a military distinction preserved in the family record. He came at length to Franklin, Virginia, where he lived to a remarkable age and died about 1823, having seen the colonies declare independence, weather a revolution, and grow into a federal nation.

Among his children recorded in the family register was Abigail McVey, sometimes rendered McVay (1788–1872), born when her father was already past fifty. Through Abigail the McVey line continued forward into the nineteenth-century generations of the family.

Sergeant John McVey was the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.