Francis Greene

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Francis Greene (1719–1783), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Virginia birth, his marriage to Elizabeth Henrietta Powell, his daughter Elizabeth Mary Greene, his death in North Carolina, and the colonial Southern context of his life spanning the Revolutionary era.

Francis Greene (1719–1783) entered the world in Culpeper, Virginia, in the second decade of the eighteenth century, and was numbered among the colonial forebears of the Hyten family. He stood seven generations removed from the compiler along the paternal-grandfather line, a deep root in the Southern colonial branches of the family tree.

The Virginia of Francis's birth was a tobacco colony in the midst of westward expansion, with Culpeper County situated along the Piedmont frontier between the Tidewater settlements and the Blue Ridge. Communities there were organized around small farms, Anglican parishes, and the slow extension of English colonial settlement into the interior. It was in this setting of colonial Virginia that Francis came of age.

He married Elizabeth Henrietta Powell, and the union produced at least one recorded daughter, Elizabeth Mary Greene, born in 1739 and living until 1814. Through this daughter the Greene line carried forward into successive generations of the family and eventually joined with the other colonial Southern lineages that fed into the Hyten descent.

At some point during his life Francis removed southward into North Carolina, a migration typical of many Virginia families of his generation who followed the great wagon roads and river valleys into the Carolina backcountry in search of land. He died in 1783 in Warren County, North Carolina, near the close of the American Revolution. The war years had been turbulent throughout the Carolinas, with significant militia activity and divided loyalties marking the final years of his life, though the particular nature of his own experience during the Revolutionary period is not preserved in the family record.

Francis Greene's life spanned the better part of the eighteenth century, beginning in colonial Virginia under the early Hanoverian kings and closing in an independent North Carolina. He was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.