Hannah Goad

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hannah Goad (1695–1788), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Virginia, parentage, her long lifespan spanning nearly the whole eighteenth century, her daughter Jane Washington, and her death in Henry County, Virginia. Notable: colonial Virginia origins; lifespan bridging late Stuart colonial era through American Independence.

Hannah Goad was born on the 11th of November, 1695, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, in the Colony of Virginia, and died in 1788 in Henry, Virginia, at the remarkable age of ninety-two. Her life thus spanned nearly the entirety of the eighteenth century, beginning under the reign of William III and concluding only after the close of the American Revolution and the framing of the new federal Constitution.

She was the daughter of Abraham John Goad (1665–1734) and Katherine Catherine Williams (1674–1741). North Farnham Parish, the place of her birth, lay in the Northern Neck of Virginia, a tidewater region settled in the seventeenth century by English colonists whose lives were ordered around the Anglican parish, the tobacco economy, and the great river systems of the Rappahannock and Potomac. It was into this colonial Anglo-Virginian world that Hannah came of age.

The known record of her family preserves a daughter, Jane Washington (1720–1800), born when Hannah was twenty-five years of age. Through this daughter the Goad line was carried forward into the next generation of the compiler's ancestry, eventually joining the broader stream of Virginia and frontier families from which the Hyten descent proceeds.

By the time of her death in 1788, Hannah had removed, or had been carried by the westward currents of Virginia settlement, into Henry County, in the southwestern Piedmont of the state. That county, formed in 1777 and named for the patriot Patrick Henry, was very much a frontier region in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, drawing settlers from the older tidewater parishes into newly opened lands. Hannah lived to witness the formation of the United States and the early years of the new republic.

Hannah was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.