Hannah Moore Smith

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hannah Moore Smith (1785–1829), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Virginia birth, marriage to Joseph F. Smith, her daughter Elizabeth, her death in Clermont County, Ohio, and the era context of westward migration from Virginia into the Ohio frontier in the early nineteenth century.

Hannah Moore Smith (1785–1829) was a daughter of Virginia, born about the year 1785 within that elder Commonwealth during the first decade following American independence. The particulars of her parentage have not been preserved in the family record, yet the surname Moore she carried into womanhood, surrendering it at the altar to take the name of her husband, Joseph F. Smith.

Virginia in the closing years of the eighteenth century was a settled and agrarian society, its tidewater and piedmont communities long established, yet its younger generations were already turning their faces westward toward the Ohio country, which the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 had newly opened to settlement. Hannah was of that generation which knew the older Virginia in childhood and the western lands in maturity. By the closing years of her life she had been carried, with her husband and household, into Clermont County in the southwestern corner of Ohio, a region of rolling country above the Ohio River which drew many Virginia families in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

To Hannah and Joseph F. Smith was born a daughter, Elizabeth Smith (1808–1875), through whom the line descended into the families that would in time join with the Hytens. Whether other children blessed the union is not recorded in the archive presently at hand.

Hannah's earthly course closed before the month of July in the year 1829, at Edenton in Clermont County, Ohio, when she was but four-and-forty years of age. Hers was a life that spanned the founding generation and the early westward expansion of the Republic, lived in the quiet station of wife and mother upon the frontier of her day. The record of her passing, brief though it be, anchors the household in Ohio soil before the middle decades of the century.

Hannah Moore Smith was a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.