Elizabeth Rogers

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Rogers (1715–1752), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, her motherhood of James Thaddeus Nichols, and the historical context of Ulster Scots-Irish life in the early eighteenth century.

Elizabeth Rogers was born in the year 1715 in Londonderry, in the northern province of Ireland, and there she lived the whole of her relatively brief life, departing this world about the year 1752 at approximately thirty-seven years of age. She stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a seventh great-grandmother, one of the more distant matriarchs whose name has been preserved through the careful keeping of family memory across the Atlantic and across the generations.

The Londonderry of Elizabeth's lifetime was a city and region shaped profoundly by the great Plantation of Ulster of the prior century, which had settled Scottish Presbyterian and English families upon Irish soil. By the early eighteenth century, the Ulster-Scots community to which families bearing the surname Rogers commonly belonged faced both economic hardship and religious disabilities under the Test Acts, conditions which would, in the decades during and after Elizabeth's life, drive the great Scots-Irish migration to the American colonies. Linen weaving, small farming, and trade defined the rhythms of life in and about Londonderry, a walled city still remembered for its famous siege of 1689 within living memory of her parents' generation.

Of Elizabeth's parentage and her husband the family record is, at present, silent, but she is remembered as the mother of James Thaddeus Nichols, born in 1737 and living until 1810. Through this son the line crossed eventually into the American branches of the family from which the compiler descends, making Elizabeth one of the European-born forebears whose Old World life provided the foundation upon which later New World generations were built.

Elizabeth Rogers was the compiler's seventh great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.