James MCKEE

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James McKee (1735–1794), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in County Tyrone, Ulster, his death in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, his father John Robert MacKie McKay, his son Joseph, and the broader Scots-Irish migration context of the eighteenth century.

James McKee (1735–1794) stands among the earliest of the compiler's transatlantic forebears whose passage from the Old World to the New is preserved in the family register. He was born in 1735 at Derryloran, in the parish town of Cookstown, County Tyrone, in the north of Ireland — a region long settled by Scots-Presbyterian families during the Ulster Plantation of the prior century. His father, John Robert MacKie McKay (1694–1765), bore a name that itself reflected the linguistic crossings of Lowland Scots and Ulster Irish, the surname appearing in records variously as MacKie, McKay, and ultimately McKee.

The Ulster of James's youth was a country of weavers, tenant farmers, and dissenting Presbyterian congregations chafing under both rent burdens and religious disabilities. From the 1710s through the 1770s, tens of thousands of such Scots-Irish families took ship for the American colonies, landing most often at Philadelphia or New Castle and pressing westward into the Pennsylvania backcountry and the Appalachian frontier. James McKee's life followed precisely this great migratory pattern, for although the particulars of his crossing are not recorded in the family's papers, by the latter part of the eighteenth century he had established himself in Bedford, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania — a rugged frontier district in the Allegheny foothills then being opened to settlement.

Among James's children was Joseph McKee (1753–1851), whose remarkable longevity carried the family's memory of its Irish origins deep into the nineteenth century. Joseph was born when his father was still a young man of eighteen, suggesting that James had married early, though the name of his wife is not preserved in the register.

James McKee died on the 9th of December, 1794, in Bedford, Somerset County, Pennsylvania, having lived through the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, and the founding years of the American Republic. He was the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.