John Robert McKie

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Robert McKie (1665–1710), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth in Galloway, parentage, marriage to Ester Hawthorn, single recorded son, transatlantic resettlement to colonial New Hampshire, and era context. Notable: Scots-Irish migration pattern; early settlement in Derry, New Hampshire; bridging Old World Galloway and New World colonial frontier.

John Robert McKie (1665–1710) entered the world in Minnigaff, a parish in the rolling hill country of Kirkcudbrightshire in southwestern Scotland, the son of John, Laird of Larg McKay (McKie) (1640–1721) and Elizabeth Dunbar (1633–1720). His birth into the Galloway gentry placed him within a region long defined by its lairdships, its dissenting Presbyterian conscience, and the turbulent religious politics of the later Stuart reigns. The Killing Time of the 1680s, when Covenanter resistance to royal religious policy reached its most violent expression, fell directly upon Galloway during John Robert's youth, and the broader unsettlement of these years would scatter many sons of the southwestern Scottish gentry across Ulster and, in time, the American colonies.

He married Ester Hawthorn, and from this union there is recorded a son, John Robert MacKie McKay (1694–1765), who would carry the family name forward into the eighteenth century.

John Robert's life closed in 1710 in Derry, in Rockingham County, in the colony of New Hampshire — a remarkable terminus for a man born in the Scottish lowlands. Derry and the surrounding township were settled in this very era by Scots and Scots-Irish families seeking land, religious latitude, and distance from the strife of the British Isles; the township would become one of the foundational Presbyterian Scots-Irish communities of northern New England. That John Robert died there at the age of forty-five suggests he was among the earliest wave of such transplanted Scots, though the particulars of his crossing and his life in the New World are not preserved in the family record.

He stands at the threshold between the family's Old World Galloway roots and its eventual American lineage. John Robert McKie was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.