Thomas Pounds

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Pounds (1687–1719), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Tidewater Virginia birth, parentage, marriage to Margaret Bradley, his son Thomas, and his death at Farnham in Richmond County. Era context includes colonial Virginia society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Thomas Pounds (1687–1719) was born in Middlesex County, Virginia, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, a son of John Pounds (1640–1719) and Elizabeth Joy (1662–1726). His birthplace lay in the heart of the Virginia Tidewater, a region then organized around the great rivers — the Rappahannock, the York, and the James — whose plantations and parish churches formed the principal framework of colonial life. Middlesex County, situated on the Middle Peninsula, had been formed in 1669 from a portion of Lancaster County, and by the time of Thomas's birth it was a settled English community of tobacco planters, Anglican parishes, and tightly-knit families bound by marriage and trade along the waterways.

Thomas married Margaret Bradley, and from their union descended a son, also named Thomas Pounds (1717–1769), through whom the Pounds line continued into succeeding generations of the family. The naming of the son after the father followed the customary English practice of the period, by which Christian names were carried forward as a matter of filial honor and remembrance.

Thomas died on the 4th of March, 1719, at Farnham, in Richmond County, Virginia, at the age of approximately thirty-two years. Richmond County, lying along the lower Rappahannock and likewise carved out in the late seventeenth century, was the neighboring jurisdiction to his native Middlesex; his death there suggests the modest geographic mobility characteristic of Tidewater families, who moved among the riverside counties as land, marriage, and opportunity directed. He survived his father by only a brief interval, the elder John Pounds having also died in 1719. His son Thomas was scarcely two years old at the time of his father's passing.

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