Mercy Deadman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mercy Deadman (1735–1810), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth, parentage, marriage to John Wilkerson, her daughter Elizabeth, and the colonial-era context of her lifetime. Notable: her life spanned the colonial period through the American Revolution and into the early Republic.

Mercy Deadman (1735–1810) was born in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the daughter of William Deadman. Her lifetime of seventy-five years stretched across one of the most consequential periods in the history of the English-speaking world: born in the late colonial era, she came of age during a time when the British colonies of North America were beginning to chafe against imperial authority, and she lived through the upheavals of the American Revolution, the founding of the United States, and the first decades of the new Republic.

Mercy was united in marriage to John Wilkerson. The Deadman and Wilkerson surnames are both of English derivation, and the union of these two families reflects the broader pattern of English colonial settlement that characterized so much of the eastern seaboard in the eighteenth century. Of her father William Deadman little is presently recorded in the family papers beyond his name, and the identity of her mother remains, for the time being, unrecovered.

Of this marriage one daughter is presently known to the archive: Elizabeth, familiarly called Betty Wilkerson, born in 1760 and surviving until 1838. Elizabeth's birth fell on the eve of the imperial crisis that would erupt into open rebellion in the following decade, and she would carry the line of her mother forward into the nineteenth century. Whether other children were born to Mercy and John, time and the loss of early records have so far obscured.

Mercy lived to see the new American nation take shape, dying in 1810, by which time the United States had elected three presidents and was approaching its second war with Great Britain. She rests among the earliest generations recoverable in this branch of the family.

Mercy Deadman was the compiler's seventh great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.