Anne Magdalene Harris

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anne Magdalene Harris (1704–1767), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Virginia, parentage, marriage to Thomas Toone, her son Travis Tune, and the tidewater Anglican parish context of 18th-century Richmond County.

Anne Magdalene Harris was born on the 27th of December, 1704, within the bounds of North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, Virginia, and died after the 28th of February, 1767, in the same parish where she had passed her entire life. Her birthplace lay in the colonial tidewater country along the Rappahannock — a region first organized as Old Rappahannock County before its division, and one in which Anglican parishes such as North Farnham served as the principal registers of births, marriages, and burials. It is through such parish records that the dates of her life are preserved.

Anne was the daughter of Phillip Harris (1670–1734), a planter of the Rappahannock country whose family had taken root in Richmond County during the second generation of English settlement in that region. The Virginia of her youth was a society shaped by tobacco cultivation, the river trade, and the slow consolidation of colonial gentry families along the tidewater. Women of her station ordered households tied closely to the agricultural calendar and to the parish, both of which structured the rhythm of rural Virginia life in the early eighteenth century.

She was married to Thomas Toone, and from their union came at least one recorded son, James Traverse — known in family record as Travis — Tune, born in 1731 and living to the remarkable age of ninety-four, dying in 1825. Through Travis the Toone, or Tune, line carried forward into the generations that would eventually intermarry with the Hyten kindred.

Anne Magdalene Harris survived to her sixty-second year, her death recorded sometime after February of 1767. She rests within the long Anglican tradition of North Farnham Parish, which she never left. Anne was the compiler's eighth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.