Thomas II Freshwater

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas II Freshwater (1672–1726), a paternal-grandfather-line (PP) 8× great-grandparent of the compiler. This entry covers his birth in colonial Virginia, parentage, marriage to Elizabeth Hudson, surviving issue, and era context. Notable: colonial Tidewater Virginia origins in Rappahannock County, second-generation English settler stock, and an early-American lineage stretching back to the late seventeenth century.

Thomas II Freshwater was born on the second day of January, 1672, in North Farnham Parish, Rappahannock County, in the colony of Virginia. He was the son of Thomas I Freshwater (1633–1694) and Johanna, called Joan, Haselock (1649–1728), and entered the world as a member of the second American generation of his line, his parents having taken root along the tidewater rivers of the Old Dominion in the middle years of the seventeenth century.

The Rappahannock country of Thomas's youth was a thinly settled colonial frontier of tobacco plantations, river landings, and Anglican parishes, in which life was shaped by the cycles of the tobacco trade, the courts of the county, and the parish vestry. North Farnham Parish, where he was born and where his family worshipped, was among the older parishes of the region, and the Freshwaters were of the modest planter class whose fortunes rose and fell with the leaf. In 1692, during Thomas's lifetime, the portion of Rappahannock County in which he lived was reorganized into Richmond County, and it was within that jurisdiction that he would spend his later years.

Thomas was united in marriage with Elizabeth Hudson, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Ann Freshwater, born in 1695 and living until 1766. Through Ann the Freshwater blood passed forward into the generations from which the compiler descends.

Thomas II Freshwater died on the seventh day of September, 1726, in the country once called Rappahannock and by then known as Richmond County, Virginia, having outlived his father by some thirty-two years and preceding his mother in death by two. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as an eighth great-grandparent, one of the earliest colonial Virginia forebears traceable in this archive.