Rebecca Thomas

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rebecca Thomas (?–1828), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her North Carolina origins, marriage to James Alexander Henderson, motherhood of Alexander Henderson, migration to Indiana, and the frontier era context of her death in Montgomery County. Notable: part of the Henderson migration from North Carolina to Indiana, a route commonly associated with Quaker-influenced settlement patterns.

Rebecca Thomas (date of birth unknown; died 1828) stands among the earliest documented ancestors in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of a 5× great-grandparent. Her birth occurred in North Carolina, though the precise year and locality are not preserved in the family record. The Thomas surname was a common one across the Carolina backcountry of the late eighteenth century, a region then populated by a mingling of English, Welsh, Scots-Irish, and German settlers, many of whom adhered to dissenting Protestant traditions, including the Society of Friends.

Rebecca was joined in marriage to James Alexander Henderson, and from this union came at least one recorded child: Alexander Henderson, born in 1810, who would live a remarkable span of one hundred and one years before his death in 1911. The Henderson family's path from North Carolina to the old Northwest mirrored a broader migration of the early nineteenth century, in which thousands of Carolina families — Quakers prominent among them — traveled overland through the Cumberland Gap and into the new states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, drawn by fresh land and, in many cases, by an aversion to the slaveholding economy of their native region.

Rebecca's life closed in 1828 in Montgomery County, Indiana. That county, situated in the west-central portion of the state, had been organized only a few years earlier, in 1823, and remained at the time of her death a frontier landscape of newly cleared farmsteads, log dwellings, and small market villages. To have lived her final years there is to have shared in the labors and hardships of first-generation Indiana settlement: the felling of timber, the breaking of prairie sod, and the establishment of households at a great remove from the comforts of older settled country.

No record of Rebecca's parentage, her age at death, or her place of burial has descended through the family archive. Rebecca was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.