Thomas Pounds

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Pounds (1717–1769), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Virginia, parentage, marriage to Jane Washington, his son William, his death in Halifax, Virginia, and broader context of 18th-century Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia life.

Thomas Pounds (1717–1769) was born on the seventh of April, 1717, in Richmond, within Farnham Parish of Richmond County, Virginia, then a thriving district of the Northern Neck Tidewater. He was the son of Thomas Pounds (1687–1719) and Margaret Bradley (1695–1730), and his early years were shadowed by the loss of both parents in childhood — his father when Thomas was but two, and his mother before he reached the age of thirteen. Such early bereavement was a common circumstance in colonial Virginia, where life expectancy remained precarious and the orphan's court frequently arranged the guardianship of minor children among kin and neighbors.

The Virginia of Thomas's upbringing was an agricultural society organized around tobacco cultivation, Anglican parishes, and the great river systems of the Rappahannock and Potomac that bore the colony's commerce to English markets. Farnham Parish, where he was christened, served as both spiritual and civic center for the surrounding plantations.

In the course of his life Thomas Pounds married Jane Washington, a union that allied him with one of the most enduring surnames of colonial Virginia. From this marriage came at least one recorded son, William H. Pound (1749–1814), whose lifetime would span the American Revolution and the early decades of the new Republic.

By the time of his death on the first of July, 1769, Thomas had removed from the Tidewater of his birth to Halifax County, Virginia, situated along the southern Piedmont near the North Carolina border. This westward migration was characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia families seeking fresh land as the older Tidewater soils were exhausted by generations of tobacco cultivation. He died on the eve of the imperial crisis that would, within a decade, transform his colony into a sovereign state.

Thomas Pounds stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a seventh great-grandfather.