Mark Tune

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mark Tune (1667–1718), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Virginia, his parentage, his death, and his one recorded child. Notable: Mark was born and died in Virginia during the colony's early decades, placing him among the first generations of English-descended settlers along the Rappahannock.

Mark Tune (1667–1718) was born in Richmond County, Virginia, in the year 1667, a son of James Toone (1625–1677) and Ann Duncombe (1628–1686). His birth placed him within the second generation of English-descended colonists settled along the tidewater frontier of the Northern Neck, a region that, by mid-seventeenth century, had grown from scattered plantations into a network of established parishes and county seats bordering the Rappahannock River. The variant spellings of the family surname — Toone, Tune, and others — were characteristic of the period, when orthography remained fluid and surnames were rendered phonetically by clerks and clergy according to the speech of the bearer.

Mark came of age in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, a turbulent era in the Virginia colony marked by the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, shifting relations with the Crown, and the gradual entrenchment of the tobacco economy that would define the region for generations. He lost his father, James, while still a youth of about ten, and his mother some nine years later, leaving him to make his way in a colony still very much under formation.

Of his domestic life the record preserves the name of one child, Thomas Toone (1705–1755), born when Mark was approaching forty. Through this son the line continued forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the branches of the family that the present compilation seeks to honor.

Mark Tune died on the 4th of February, 1718, his death recorded in the locality long associated with the family in southwestern Virginia. He was fifty-one years of age. Mark stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a 9× great-grandfather, among the earliest American-born forebears whose names and dates have been recovered for this register.