James Thaddeus Nichols

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James Thaddeus Nichols (1737–1810), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Irish birth in County Antrim, parentage through Elizabeth Rogers, transatlantic migration implied by his death in North Carolina, marriage to Elizabeth Mary Greene, and his son James Thaddeus the younger. Notable: Ulster-Irish origin and Burke County, North Carolina, frontier settlement during the late colonial and early Federal eras.

James Thaddeus Nichols (1737–1810) entered the world at Larne, in County Antrim on the northeastern coast of Ireland, a port town then deeply enmeshed in the Ulster-Scots emigration that would carry tens of thousands across the Atlantic in the mid-eighteenth century. He was the son of Elizabeth Rogers (1715–1752), who died when James was a boy of about fifteen — a not uncommon sorrow in an age when life expectancy for women of child-bearing years remained perilously short.

The arc of his life traces one of the great population movements of the era. Born on the Antrim coast and laid to rest in Burke County, North Carolina, James Thaddeus belonged to that generation of Ulster emigrants who, fleeing rack-rents, religious disabilities, and crop failures at home, found their way through the ports of Philadelphia and Charleston and then southward and westward along the Great Wagon Road into the Carolina piedmont and foothills. Burke County, lying against the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, was in his lifetime a frontier of pioneer farmsteads, Revolutionary skirmishes, and small market settlements — a region whose character was shaped in no small measure by Scots-Irish settlers of precisely his background.

James Thaddeus took to wife Elizabeth Mary Greene, and from their union came a son, James Thaddeus Nichols the younger (1762–1824), who carried his father's name forward into the next generation and the new American republic. The son's birth in 1762 places the family in the Carolinas well before the Revolution, suggesting that the elder James had crossed the ocean and established himself in the Carolina backcountry while still a young man.

He lived to the age of seventy-three, dying in 1810 in the county he had helped to settle.

James Thaddeus Nichols stood as the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.