Thomas Jackson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Jackson (1728–1766), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Plymouth, his parentage, marriage to Patience Harryman, his son Andrew, his death in Maryland, and the mid-eighteenth-century context of southward colonial migration.

Thomas Jackson (1728–1766) stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a seventh-great-grandparent, his life spanning the middle decades of the eighteenth century, an era in which the British North American colonies grew rapidly in population and stretched their settlements southward and westward from their original coastal footholds.

He was born on the 15th of February, 1728/29, in Plymouth, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts — the venerable Pilgrim town that, by the time of Thomas's birth, was already a century old and had long since been folded into the larger Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the son of Jonathan Jackson (1679–1739) and Rachel Atkinson (1688–1748), a New England couple whose family had been planted in Plymouth Colony soil for several generations.

Thomas married Patience Harryman, and from their union came at least one recorded son, Andrew Harryman Jackson (1754–1837), whose middle name preserved the maternal surname in the manner customary among colonial families of the period. Andrew's long life — extending nearly to the close of Andrew Jackson's presidency — would carry the Jackson line forward into the new American republic.

At some point in his adult years Thomas removed from Massachusetts to Maryland, where he died in 1766 at the relatively young age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight. The middle decades of the eighteenth century saw considerable movement of New England families into the Chesapeake colonies and beyond, drawn by available land and by the broadening commercial networks that linked the colonies before the Revolution. The Harryman surname, well attested in colonial Maryland, suggests that his marriage may have been connected to this southward relocation.

Thomas did not live to see the political ruptures that would reshape the colonies within a decade of his death; the Stamp Act crisis of the previous year was the closest he came to witnessing the gathering storm. Thomas was the compiler's seventh-great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.