ELIZABETH SMITH

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Smith (1808–1875), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Ohio birth, Indiana death, parentage by Joseph F. and Hannah Moore Smith, marriage to John Hendricks, and her son James Wesley Hendricks. Era context touches on Ohio frontier birth and Indiana settlement; possible Hendricks Quaker migration lineage is noted.

Elizabeth Smith (1808–1875) was born on the 22nd of November, 1808, in the State of Ohio, then a young commonwealth scarcely five years admitted to the Union. The Ohio of her infancy was a forested frontier still being parceled from the Northwest Territory, where settler families from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas were laying down the first generation of American-born children west of the Alleghenies. Into this transitional country Elizabeth was born to Joseph F. Smith, who survived until 1864, and to Hannah Moore Smith (1785–1829), who departed when Elizabeth was but twenty years of age — a loss not uncommon in an era when women's lives were frequently shortened by the rigours of childbearing and frontier illness.

In the course of her young womanhood Elizabeth was joined in marriage to John Hendricks, of the Hendricks line whose name recurs through several generations of the family register. The Hendricks surname is one long associated with the Quaker migrations southward from Pennsylvania into the Carolinas, and thence westward into Indiana and Ohio in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Friends families withdrew in large numbers from slaveholding regions to the free soil of the Old Northwest.

Of the union of Elizabeth Smith and John Hendricks there is recorded a son, James Wesley Hendricks (1838–1912), through whom the line descends to the compiler. James Wesley came of age on the eve of the Civil War, a generational marker that shaped nearly every family in the agricultural counties of central Indiana.

Elizabeth lived out her later years in Montgomery County, Indiana — a region of prairie and woodland farms first opened to settlement in the 1820s — where she died on the 17th of July, 1875, in her sixty-seventh year. She rested two decades behind the passing of her father and outlived her mother by nearly half a century.

Elizabeth was the compiler's 4× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.