John Hendrix

John Hendrix, born in the year 1760 in North Carolina, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of a sixth great-grandparent. The year of his death has not been preserved in the family record, leaving the close of his life among the many quiet silences of the archive.

His birth in North Carolina places him within a colony then still under British authority, on the eve of the great upheaval that would, within a decade and a half, sunder the American colonies from the Crown. North Carolina in the 1760s was a frontier of mingled settlement, drawing Scots-Irish, German, English, and Welsh families southward down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Among these migrants moved a sizable Quaker population, and the Hendricks surname — appearing variously in the records as Hendrix, Hendrickson, and Hendricks — is well attested among the Friends' meetings of Piedmont North Carolina during this period. While no direct evidence preserves John's religious affiliation, the surname's pattern of movement is suggestive of that broader migratory current which would, in the generations following, carry many such families westward into Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.

Of John's marriage and the identity of his wife, the record offers no testimony. He is known to the family chronicle through his son, Joseph Hendrix — or Hendricks, as the surname later settled — who was born in 1776, the very year of the Declaration of Independence, and who lived a long life, surviving until 1862, on the eve of the great Civil War. That a son of John's reached such an age, and bridged the founding of the Republic to the era of its gravest trial, gives a quiet measure to the span of the family's American story even in this earliest generation of the documented line.

John Hendrix was the compiler's sixth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.