JOHN WILKERSON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Wilkerson (1730–?), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Pennsylvania birth, marriage to Mercy Deadman, daughter Elizabeth, eventual settlement in Randolph County, North Carolina, and the colonial migration patterns of his era. Notable: represents the southward Pennsylvania-to-Carolina backcountry migration of the mid-eighteenth century.

John Wilkerson, born in 1730 in the colony of Pennsylvania, stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of a seventh great-grandparent. The particulars of his death are not preserved in the family record, though he is known to have ended his days in Randolph County, North Carolina, having joined the great southward current of settlers that so profoundly shaped the American backcountry in the eighteenth century.

Pennsylvania in the 1730s, when John drew his first breath, was a colony marked by religious plurality and steady immigration, drawing English, German, and Scots-Irish families to William Penn's tolerant province. By mid-century, land pressures and the lure of inexpensive acreage along the Great Wagon Road would carry many such Pennsylvania-born sons down through the Shenandoah Valley and into the Carolina Piedmont. Randolph County, formed in 1779 from Guilford, became one of the principal destinations of that migration, and John Wilkerson's presence there places him squarely within this broad and consequential movement of peoples.

He was united in marriage to Mercy Deadman, whose surname, though uncommon, is preserved in the family's records as the matriarch of his line. Of their union, the archive records a daughter, Elizabeth — known affectionately as Betty — born in 1760 and living until 1838, a span of seventy-eight years that would carry her memory of her parents well into the early decades of the American republic. Through Elizabeth, the Wilkerson blood was carried forward into succeeding generations of the compiler's ancestry.

While no occupation, religious affiliation, or further detail concerning John's character or estate is preserved, his life bridged two colonies and two distinct chapters of American settlement: the maturing Quaker and Pennsylvania-German world of his birth, and the rough, rising Piedmont of his later years. John Wilkerson was the compiler's seventh great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.