John Hendricks

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Hendricks (1805–1874), a 4× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Kentucky birth, parentage, marriage to Elizabeth Smith, his son James Wesley, his death in Waynetown, Indiana, and era context regarding the Hendricks family's southern-to-midwestern migration pattern.

John Hendricks (1805–1874) was born on the 27th of July, 1805, in Kentucky, the son of Joseph Hendrix (sometimes rendered Hendricks) and Nancy Meeks. His birth into the early-republic frontier of Kentucky placed him among that generation of trans-Appalachian settlers whose parents had crossed the mountains in the wake of the Revolution. The Hendricks surname, borne by families of varied origin including Quaker households that drifted from North Carolina into the Ohio Valley, was widespread along this corridor of westward movement, and John's life would trace a portion of that broader migratory current.

He married Elizabeth Smith, and from their union came at least one recorded son, James Wesley Hendricks (1838–1912), who carried the line forward into the later nineteenth century. The middle name Wesley, much favored in those years, was a quiet testament to the strong Methodist current then sweeping the Ohio Valley, though the family's own confessional attachments are not herein established.

By the close of his life John had settled in Waynetown, in Montgomery County, Indiana — a small farming community in the west-central part of the state, founded in the 1830s along the National Road's tributary routes. Indiana in the middle decades of the nineteenth century drew countless families out of Kentucky, as fertile prairie soils and the absence of slavery encouraged southern-born yeomen to remove northward across the Ohio River. John's father Joseph, who lived until 1862, and his mother Nancy, who had died in 1845, appear to have been part of this same general resettlement.

John Hendricks died on the 2nd of April, 1874, at Waynetown, having lived sixty-eight years and witnessed the transformation of the American interior from frontier to settled agricultural republic, through the trials of the Civil War, and into the early years of Reconstruction.

John was a 4× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.