Katherine Catherine Williams

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Katherine Catherine Williams (1674–1741), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth, life, and death in colonial Virginia, her marriage to Abraham John Goad, her daughter Hannah Goad, and era context regarding late-seventeenth-century Richmond County. Notable: deep colonial Virginia roots predating the American Revolution by nearly a century.

Katherine Catherine Williams (1674–1741) was born on the first day of January 1674 in Farnham, Richmond County, in the Colony of Virginia, and there she remained until her death on 23 May 1741, having spent the entirety of her sixty-seven years within the same tidewater parish of her birth. She occupies a place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandmother.

The Farnham of Katherine's lifetime lay in the Northern Neck of Virginia, a region of tobacco plantations, riverine commerce, and Anglican parishes nestled between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. Richmond County itself had been formed in 1692, when Katherine was a young woman of eighteen, carved from the older Rappahannock County as the colonial population expanded. The community she knew was one of small landholders and great planters alike, where parish life, county courts, and the rhythms of tobacco cultivation governed the calendar. Katherine's life spanned the reigns of five English and British monarchs, from Charles II through George II, and witnessed Virginia's gradual transformation from a frontier colony into an established and prosperous province of the British Crown.

Katherine was joined in marriage to Abraham John Goad, with whom she established a household in Richmond County. To this union was born at least one daughter of record, Hannah Goad (1695–1788), whose remarkable lifespan of ninety-three years would carry the family's memory of the seventeenth-century Virginia tidewater forward nearly to the close of the eighteenth. Through Hannah and her descendants, the Goad and Williams names entered the deeper genealogical fabric that would, generations later, flow into the Hyten family.

That Katherine was born, married, bore children, and died within the bounds of a single Virginia parish marks her as among the most rooted of the compiler's colonial ancestors. Katherine Catherine Williams was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-paternal line.