Amanda Carry

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Amanda Carry (1725–unknown), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Virginia birth, marriage to James Traverse Tune, her known daughter Mary Elizabeth Tune, and the colonial Virginia context of her lifetime in the mid-eighteenth century.

Amanda Carry, born about the year 1725 in the colony of Virginia, takes her place in the family register as a distant matriarch upon the paternal-grandfather line. The particulars of her parentage, her precise birthplace, and the year and circumstance of her death remain, at present, beyond the reach of the archive — a not uncommon silence in the records of colonial women, whose lives were often inscribed only in the margins of their husbands' and children's documents.

Virginia in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was a colony of expanding tobacco settlements, of small Anglican parishes pressing westward from the Tidewater into the Piedmont, and of households bound together by ties of land, kinship, and a slow but steady migration of families from the older coastal counties toward the frontier. Into such a world Amanda was born, and within it she came of age.

She was joined in marriage to James Traverse — rendered also as Travenor and known familiarly as "Travis" — Tune. The union produced at least one daughter known to the present compiler, Mary Elizabeth Tune, born in 1756, who would live to the remarkable age of ninety years, dying in 1846 after witnessing the founding of the Republic and the better part of its first century. Through this daughter the line descended into the generations that would eventually carry the family westward.

Amanda's later years, her place of burial, and whether further children issued from the marriage are matters yet to be uncovered. What survives is the essential frame: a Virginia-born woman of the early colonial generations, wife of James Travis Tune, and mother of Mary Elizabeth, through whom her blood continues into the present family.

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