James Alexander Henderson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James Alexander Henderson (1796–1838), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Virginia birth, parentage, marriage to Rebecca Thomas, his son Alexander, his early death in Indiana before December 1838, and the broader context of the Henderson family's westward migration in the early Republic.

James Alexander Henderson (1796–1838) was born in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the son of Richard Holyfield Henderson (1751–1840). His life spanned the early decades of the American Republic — a period in which families bearing the Henderson name, many of them of Scots-Irish and English stock, moved steadily westward from the Virginia and Carolina piedmont into the Ohio Valley and the newly opened lands of Indiana. The Henderson surname figures prominently among the Quaker- and Protestant-influenced families who joined this great migration, drawn by the promise of fresh soil and the prospect of freeholds beyond the older seaboard settlements.

James married Rebecca Thomas, and from their union came at least one recorded son, Alexander Henderson (1810–1911), whose remarkable lifespan of more than a century would carry the Henderson line deep into the modern era. The birth of Alexander in 1810 places James's married life in the years immediately preceding the War of 1812, a turbulent season in which the western frontier of the young nation was contested and the agricultural economy of the interior was still in its formative stages.

By the time of his death, which occurred before December of 1838, James had removed from Virginia to Indiana — itself admitted to the Union only in 1816 — joining the broader current of Upland South families who reshaped the demographic character of the Old Northwest during the 1820s and 1830s. Indiana in that period was a land of newly cleared timber, county seats yet finding their footing, and Methodist, Baptist, and Quaker meetings establishing themselves alongside the homesteads. James did not live to see his fortieth decade complete; his father Richard outlived him by two years, dying in 1840.

James Alexander Henderson was a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.