Jane Washington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jane Washington (1720–1800), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Virginia, parentage, marriage to Thomas Pounds, her son William H. Pound, and the era context of the Northern Neck and southern Virginia frontier during the eighteenth century.

Jane Washington was born on the 21st of June, 1720, in Farnham, Richmond County, Virginia, into the established tidewater society of the Northern Neck. The Northern Neck of colonial Virginia in the early eighteenth century was a region of tobacco plantations, Anglican parishes, and tightly interwoven planter families, and it was within this society that Jane entered the world. She was the daughter of Hannah Goad, born in 1695 and surviving to the considerable age of ninety-three in 1788, a longevity remarkable in an age when such years were the inheritance of relatively few.

Jane was united in marriage to Thomas Pounds, and from this union came at least one recorded son, William H. Pound, born in 1749 and living until 1814. William's lifespan would carry the family's line through the American Revolution, the founding of the Republic, and into the early national period — a generational arc that began with parents born under British colonial rule.

In the course of her life, Jane removed from the Northern Neck of her birth to the southern Piedmont of Virginia, for it was in Halifax County that she ended her days sometime before the year 1800. Halifax County, situated along the North Carolina border, was in the latter eighteenth century a region of expanding tobacco cultivation and steady settlement, drawing families southwestward from the older tidewater counties in search of fresh land. Jane's migration was thus part of a broader pattern by which Virginia families pressed inland across the generations.

She lived through extraordinary times — the colonial wars, the long imperial crisis with Britain, the Revolution, and the establishment of the new nation — though the particulars of her own response to these events lie beyond the record. She died before the turn of the nineteenth century, having outlived her mother by little more than a decade.

Jane Washington was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.