Abraham John Goad

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Abraham John Goad (1665–1734), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Lancaster County, Virginia; his marriage to Katherine Catherine Williams; his daughter Hannah Goad; his death at Farnham in Richmond County, Virginia; and the broader context of colonial Tidewater Virginia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Abraham John Goad (1665–1734) entered the world on the tenth day of May, 1665, in Lancaster County, Virginia, one of the older settled jurisdictions of the colonial Tidewater. His birth fell only a generation removed from the founding of the Virginia colony, in a region where tobacco husbandry, Anglican parishes, and the river-borne commerce of the Rappahannock defined the rhythms of daily life. The Northern Neck, that long peninsula between the Potomac and the Rappahannock, was in this era a country of modest plantations, indentured labor, and tightly woven kinship networks among the English settler families who had crossed the Atlantic in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

In the course of his life Abraham took to wife Katherine Catherine Williams, and from their union descended at least one daughter recorded in the family register, Hannah Goad, born in 1695. Hannah's own long life, which extended to 1788, would carry forward the Goad name and blood into the years of the American Revolution, though her father did not live to see those distant events.

Abraham resided, at the end of his days, in Farnham, in Richmond County, Virginia — a community lying within the parish bounds of North Farnham, on territory that had been carved out of the older Lancaster County in 1692. There, on the eleventh day of April, 1734, he died, having attained the age of sixty-eight years, a respectable span in an age when fevers, accidents, and the rigors of plantation life claimed many far younger. He passed from this life in the early reign of King George II, while the Virginia colony stood yet four decades distant from the upheavals of independence.

Abraham John Goad was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.