*John LONG

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Long (1740–1830), a sixth great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, marriage to Christian McFarland, his daughter Lydia Jane Long, and his death in West Virginia. Notable: 18th-century Scots emigration to the Appalachian frontier; the surname is flagged as an unverified Ancestry hint.

John Long (1740–1830) stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, where he occupies the position of a sixth great-grandparent. His surname is here marked with an asterisk to denote that the connection rests upon an unverified Ancestry hint rather than upon a primary record; the reader should weigh the entry accordingly, and future archivists are encouraged to seek corroborating documentation before treating the line as settled.

John was born in Scotland in the year 1740. The Scotland of his birth was a country still adjusting to the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and, within a few short years of his nativity, would be convulsed by the Jacobite rising of 1745. In the decades that followed, economic hardship, the dislocations of the Highland Clearances, and the steady pull of opportunity across the Atlantic prompted a great migration of Scots and Scots-Irish families to the American colonies, many of whom found their way into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Appalachian frontier.

John was united in marriage to Christian McFarland, whose surname likewise bespeaks a Scottish or Scots-Irish provenance. Of their household, the family record preserves one daughter, Lydia Jane Long, born in 1776 — the very year of American independence — and departing this life in 1830. Through Lydia Jane the line of descent continues forward into the generations that would eventually issue in the compiler.

John Long lived to the considerable age of ninety years, dying in 1830 in what is now West Virginia. That region, in his lifetime still part of Virginia and only later set apart as a separate state during the Civil War, was characteristic ground for families of Scots and Scots-Irish stock who had pressed westward across the Blue Ridge in search of land and livelihood.

John was the compiler's sixth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, subject to the noted caveat regarding the surname.