Johanna "Joan" Haselock

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johanna 'Joan' Haselock (1649–1728), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Virginia, her parentage, marriage to Thomas I Freshwater, her son and descendants, and historical context of the early Chesapeake tidewater settlements in the mid-seventeenth century.

Johanna Haselock, known familiarly as Joan, was born on the 28th of May, 1649, in Farnham Parish, Rappahannock County, Virginia, and departed this life in 1728 in Richmond County of the same colony, having attained the venerable age of seventy-nine years. She was the daughter of George Frances Haslock (1620–1663) and Sarah Michelle Bramman (1629–1660), both of whom had crossed the Atlantic to settle along the tidewater reaches of the Rappahannock during the earliest decades of organized English habitation in that region.

Joan's childhood was marked by the hardships common to the first generation born upon Virginia soil. The loss of her mother when she was but eleven years of age, followed by the death of her father three years later, left her orphaned before she had reached her fifteenth year. Farnham Parish in this era was a sparsely settled frontier of tobacco plantations, modest parish churches, and the slow consolidation of the Anglican order under the Virginia colonial government. Rappahannock County itself was later subdivided, and in time Joan would find herself residing in what had become Richmond County, though the lands and waterways of her youth remained unchanged.

In the fullness of time Joan was joined in matrimony to Thomas I Freshwater, a union that produced at least one son of record, Thomas II Freshwater, born in 1672 and surviving until 1726. Through this son the Freshwater line continued forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately threaded its way down through successive generations into the Hyten family.

Joan outlived her son by two years, a circumstance both unusual and sorrowful, and ended her days as a long-settled inhabitant of Richmond County, having witnessed the transformation of tidewater Virginia from rough frontier into an established colonial society.

Johanna Haselock was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.