Elizabeth Joy

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Joy (1662–1726), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Barbados, marriage to John Pounds, her son Thomas Pounds, and her death in Richmond County, Virginia. Notable: Caribbean colonial origin and trans-Atlantic migration from Barbados to tidewater Virginia in the late seventeenth century.

Elizabeth Joy (1662–1726) was born on the ninth day of November, 1662, in the parish of Christ Church, Barbados, then among the wealthiest and most populous of England's Caribbean colonies. The Barbados of her infancy was a sugar island in full ascent, its parish churches serving as the civic anchors of English colonial society in the West Indies; baptismal and parish records from Christ Church in this period stand among the oldest surviving English colonial registers in the New World. From this Caribbean origin Elizabeth's life carried her northward to the tidewater of Virginia, a passage well attested in the period as planters, indentured servants, and free settlers moved between the sugar islands and the Chesapeake.

She became the wife of John Pounds, and of this union is recorded a son, Thomas Pounds, born in 1687 and dying in 1719, predeceasing his mother by some seven years. The loss of an only recorded child in his prime was a sorrow not uncommon to the age, when fevers and the hardships of frontier Virginia took many in middle life.

Elizabeth lived out her later years in the parish of Farnham, in Richmond County, Virginia, a community seated along the Rappahannock River in the Northern Neck. Farnham Parish, established in the late seventeenth century, formed part of the Anglican ecclesiastical and civil order that governed colonial Virginia life. There, on the twenty-second day of November, 1726, just shy of her sixty-fourth year, Elizabeth Joy concluded her earthly course.

Her life thus spanned two colonial worlds — the sugar parishes of Barbados in which she was born, and the riverine tobacco country of Virginia in which she died — bearing witness to the wider Atlantic currents that bound the English colonies together in her century.

Elizabeth Joy was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.