Margaret Bradley

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Margaret Bradley (1695–1730), an eighth great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Virginia, her parentage, her marriage to Thomas Pounds, and her son Thomas. Notable: early colonial Tidewater Virginia heritage, born in Farnham parish, Richmond County.

Margaret Bradley was born in 1695 in Farnham, Richmond County, in the Colony of Virginia, and departed this life in 1730, also within Virginia, having lived but thirty-five years. She was the daughter of John Bradley (1660–1715) and Elizabeth Nomaiden (1662–1723), a household rooted in the Tidewater region during the closing decades of the seventeenth century, when Virginia's Northern Neck was steadily being settled by English planters and their families along the Rappahannock River.

Farnham, the parish of Margaret's birth, lay within Richmond County, one of the older administrative divisions of the colony, established in 1692 only three years before her arrival. The community of the Northern Neck in this period was largely Anglican in religious establishment and agricultural in character, organized around the cultivation of tobacco and the network of small landings and parish churches that bound the scattered plantations into recognizable neighborhoods. It was in such a setting that Margaret passed her childhood and came of age.

In the course of time Margaret was united in marriage to Thomas Pounds. From this union came at least one recorded son, also named Thomas Pounds, born in 1717 and surviving until 1769. Through this line the Bradley and Pounds families were joined and their descendants carried forward into the generations that followed.

Margaret's death in 1730, while her son was yet a boy of thirteen, speaks to the fragility of life in early colonial Virginia, where women in particular faced the recurring perils of childbirth and the fevers endemic to the lowland country. The years of her life nevertheless spanned a formative era in the colony's history, bridging the late seventeenth-century period of consolidation and the early Georgian decades of the eighteenth century.

Margaret Bradley stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth great-grandmother, an early American forebear whose Virginia origins reach back into the first century of English settlement on this continent.