Joseph Hendrix\Hendricks

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Joseph Hendrix/Hendricks (1776–1862), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his North Carolina birth, parentage, marriage to Nancy Meeks, his son John, migration to Indiana, and era context including the Hendricks family's likely Quaker-influenced southern-to-midwestern migration pattern.

Joseph Hendrix, whose surname appears in the records under the dual orthography of Hendrix and Hendricks, was born on the first day of June in the year 1776 in North Carolina, in the very season of American independence. He was the son of John Hendrix, born about 1760, and stood among the earliest generation of the family to come of age beneath the new republic rather than the British crown.

The North Carolina of Joseph's youth was a land of small farms, piedmont forests, and dispersed religious communities, among them the Society of Friends, whose meetings dotted the Carolina back-country. The Hendricks surname is one frequently associated with that Quaker migration corridor which, in the decades following Joseph's birth, would carry many North Carolina families northwestward into the Ohio Valley and onward into Indiana — partly in search of land, and partly in withdrawal from the slaveholding economy of the South.

Joseph was united in marriage to Nancy Meeks, and of that union the records preserve a son, John Hendricks, born in 1805 and living until 1874. Through this son the line descended toward the compiler's own paternal-grandfather branch.

At some point in his long life Joseph removed from his native North Carolina to the prairies and woodlands of Montgomery County, Indiana, a county organized in 1823 and rapidly settled in the decades thereafter by families of southern origin tracing the same overland paths. There, after a life spanning eighty-six years and the whole formative arc of the early Republic — from Washington's first administration through the opening of the Civil War — Joseph Hendrix died on the first day of December in the year 1862.

Joseph was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.