Elizabeth Mary Greene

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Mary Greene (1739–1814), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Irish birth at Mallow, her parentage, her marriage to James Thaddeus Nichols, her son, her death in western Pennsylvania, and the broader era context of 18th-century Irish emigration to colonial America.

Elizabeth Mary Greene (1739–1814) was born in the town of Mallow, in County Cork, Ireland, into a household marked early by sorrow: her mother, Elizabeth Henrietta Powell, died in 1740, when Elizabeth was scarcely a year old. Her father, Francis Greene, born in 1719, survived her mother by more than four decades, living until 1783. Elizabeth's early years thus unfolded under the shadow of a mother lost in infancy, a circumstance not uncommon in an age when childbirth carried grave peril.

Mallow in the mid-eighteenth century was a market town along the River Blackwater, known for its mineral spa and for a settled Anglo-Irish gentry. It was from this corner of southern Ireland that Elizabeth, in time, would be drawn across the Atlantic. The decades of her young womanhood coincided with a substantial movement of families from Ireland to the British North American colonies, drawn by land, opportunity, and kin already settled.

Elizabeth was joined in marriage to James Thaddeus Nichols, and from their union came at least one recorded son, James Thaddeus Nichols (1762–1824), who carried his father's name forward into the next generation. The son's birth in 1762 places the family within the turbulent years preceding the American Revolution, an era in which immigrant households of Elizabeth's station found themselves caught between old loyalties and a new country in formation.

Elizabeth's later years were spent in western Pennsylvania, and she died on the 15th of December, 1814, in St. Clair, Allegheny County — a region that, by the close of her life, had transformed from frontier outpost into a settled gateway of the young republic. She was seventy-five years of age at her passing, having traversed in a single lifetime the distance from an Irish market town to the rising industrial valleys of the Ohio country.

Elizabeth Mary Greene was a sixth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.