Margaret Byrne McClure-McVey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Byrne McClure-McVey (1715–1743), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Ulster, marriage to William McVey, motherhood of Sergeant John McVey, transatlantic migration to colonial Virginia, and the broader Scots-Irish emigration context of the early eighteenth century.

Margaret Byrne McClure-McVey was born in 1715 in Londonderry, County Donegal, in the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. Her birthplace situates her within the Scots-Irish community whose forebears had been settled in Ulster during the seventeenth-century Plantation and who, by the early decades of the eighteenth century, were beginning the great westward migration across the Atlantic in search of land, religious latitude, and relief from economic strain. The years of Margaret's youth coincided with successive harvest failures and rising rents in Ulster, conditions which propelled thousands of her countrymen toward the American colonies, particularly the Delaware Valley and the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas.

Margaret married William McVey, and together they crossed the ocean to make their home in colonial Virginia. The colony in this period was expanding westward into the Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont, frontier districts where Scots-Irish settlers were welcomed as a buffer population and where land grants drew families of modest means into newly opened country. It was in this colonial Virginia setting that Margaret's later years were spent.

To Margaret and William was born a son, John McVey, in 1737. He would in time become known as Sergeant John McVey, his military rank reflecting service in the era of the American Revolution, and he lived a long life, surviving until 1823. Through him the family line descended into the generations that would eventually join with the Hyten kindred.

Margaret's own life was a brief one. She died sometime after 1743 in Virginia, her passing falling in the early decades of colonial Virginia's frontier expansion and well before the upheavals of the Revolution in which her son would take part. The exact circumstances and place of her death within the colony are not recorded in the family papers.

Margaret Byrne McClure-McVey was a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.