Elizabeth Branson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Branson (1715–1788), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Virginia, her parentage, her marriage into the Henderson family, her son, and her death in colonial North Carolina. Notable: her marriage to Richard Holyfield Henderson, known as 'The Quaker,' reflecting the Quaker migration current that carried families southward through Virginia into the Carolinas.

Elizabeth Branson (1715–1788) was born in 1715 in New Kent County, in the Virginia colony, to William "Thomas" Branson (1684–1760) and Mary Tate (1688–1729). She came of age in a tidewater Virginia still ordered by the tobacco economy and the parish system of the established Anglican church, though dissenting communities — Quaker, Presbyterian, and Baptist — were taking root along the colony's western and southern edges and exerting an increasing pull upon families of conscience.

Her mother, Mary Tate, died in 1729 when Elizabeth was approximately fourteen years of age, a not uncommon bereavement in an era when childbirth and recurrent fevers shortened many lives. Her father William survived until 1760, living into Elizabeth's middle years.

Elizabeth was united in marriage to Richard Holyfield Henderson, remembered in the family record as "The Quaker," whose own course of life carried him from Virginia into South Carolina. Her marriage thus joined her to one of the great migratory streams of the eighteenth-century American colonies — the southward movement of Quaker and dissenting families out of Virginia along the wagon roads into the Carolina piedmont, where land was abundant and the reach of the established church less firm. Of this union is recorded a son, Richard Holyfield Henderson (1751–1840), who would live to the remarkable age of eighty-nine and carry the line forward.

Elizabeth ended her days in Granville County, in the North Carolina colony, where she died on the 26th of April, 1788, having seen the colonies in which she was born become a new republic. She rested at the age of seventy-three, an unusually long life for a woman of her generation.

Elizabeth Branson stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a 7× great-grandmother.