George Chapman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is George Chapman (1784–1842), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth in Yorkshire, his parents William James Chapman and Agnes Elizabeth Burton, his marriage to Elizabeth 'Betty' Burton, his daughter Isabella, and his death in Parke County, Indiana. Notable: transatlantic migration from Yorkshire, England to the Indiana frontier.

George Chapman (1784–1842) entered the family record on the sixth of June, 1784, at Birchentree in the township of Dent, Yorkshire, England. He was the son of William James Chapman (1754–1800) and Agnes Elizabeth Burton (1754–1794), and he came of age in the rugged dales country of northern Yorkshire — a region of stone-walled pastures, dissenting chapels, and close-knit yeoman families whose surnames intermarried across generations. The death of his mother in 1794, when George was but ten years of age, and that of his father six years afterward, left him orphaned before he had reached his sixteenth year, a circumstance not uncommon among the laboring families of late-Georgian England.

George in time married Elizabeth Burton, called 'Betty,' whose surname echoed that of his own mother and suggests the customary Dales pattern of marriage within an extended kindred. From this union came at least one recorded daughter, Isabella Chapman, born in 1820, who lived until 1898 and through whom the Chapman line continued in America.

At some point in the course of his life George removed across the Atlantic, for the record fixes his death on the second of March, 1842, in Parke County, Indiana. Parke County in that period lay on the western frontier of the young state, settled scarcely two decades earlier and populated by a mixture of Upland Southerners, Quakers, and English and Scotch-Irish newcomers drawn by the promise of timber and tillable land along the Wabash tributaries. To have died there in 1842, at the age of fifty-seven, places George among the first generation of English-born settlers to lay their bones in Indiana soil, having crossed both an ocean and the Alleghenies in the course of a single lifetime.

George Chapman was a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.