Elizabeth Hester SMITH Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson (1665–1767), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Jamestown, Virginia parentage, marriage to Dr. Archibald Johnson, her daughter Elizabeth, death in Charles County, Maryland, and the colonial era context of her remarkable century-spanning life.

Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson (1665–1767) was born on the 29th of October, 1665, at Jamestown in James City, Virginia — the oldest permanent English settlement in the American colonies and, in the year of her birth, still very much a frontier outpost on the James River. She was the daughter of Edward Smith (1636–1696) and Elizabeth Symons (1632–1678), a household rooted in the tobacco-colony society of the mid-seventeenth century. Virginia in this period was a place of fragile prosperity and frequent hardship; Jamestown itself had endured fire, disease, and unrest, and would suffer further upheaval during Bacon's Rebellion when Elizabeth was eleven years of age.

She was joined in marriage to Dr. Archibald Johnson, and through this union she became, by the customs of the day, mistress of a physician's household — a position of some standing in colonial society, where trained medical men were comparatively few. Of their issue, the family record preserves a daughter, Elizabeth Johnson (1679–1722), through whom the line descended.

In the course of her long life Elizabeth removed northward to the Province of Maryland, where she resided in Charles County. There, on the 5th of August, 1767, she died, having reached the extraordinary age of one hundred and one years. Her lifespan is a marvel of the family register: she was born under King Charles II of England, while Virginia was still a young royal colony, and she lived to see the eve of the imperial crisis that would, within a decade of her passing, give rise to the American Revolution. Few in colonial America attained such longevity, and her years bridged nearly the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Elizabeth was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.