Anna Annes Potter

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Annes Potter (1741–1815), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Irish birth, her parentage in the Potter and Baird families, her daughter Jane Young, her death in frontier Kentucky, and broader era context regarding Ulster-Scots emigration and westward settlement.

Anna Annes Potter, born in 1741 at Lower Strabine in County Tyrone, Ireland, and laid to rest on the 14th of October, 1815, in Fleming County, Kentucky, occupies a distant but well-traced station among the compiler's maternal lines of descent within the paternal-grandfather branch. She was the daughter of John Potter (1705–1758) and Martha Bard Baird (1708–1782), a union joining two families whose surnames appear repeatedly among the Ulster-Scots Presbyterian communities of Tyrone in the early eighteenth century. The region of Strabane, lying along the River Foyle, was at that time a center of linen manufacture and of considerable emigration, and the decades surrounding Anna's birth saw thousands of Ulster families cross the Atlantic in search of land and religious latitude in the American colonies.

Anna's own life carried her from the green hills of Tyrone across the ocean and ultimately to the trans-Appalachian frontier. Her death in Fleming County, Kentucky—then a young county organized only in 1798 out of the larger Mason tract—places her among the early generation of settlers who pressed westward through the Cumberland Gap and the Ohio River corridor in the years following the Revolution. That such a journey was undertaken by a woman born in Ireland is a testament to the migratory currents of her age, in which Ulster emigrants and their descendants formed a substantial portion of the Kentucky frontier population.

From Anna descended a daughter, Jane Young (1775–1856), through whom the line continues forward into the compiler's ancestry. The Potter and Baird surnames, together with the Young connection, anchor this branch of the family firmly within the Scots-Irish stream of American settlement, with its characteristic pattern of Presbyterian faith, frontier hardihood, and movement from Pennsylvania and Virginia into the Kentucky bluegrass.

Anna Annes Potter was the compiler's sixth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.