JONATHAN JACKSON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jonathan Jackson (1679–1739), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Virginia, his death in Annapolis, Maryland, his marriage to Rachel Atkinson, and the son Thomas through whom the Jackson line descended. Era context touches the Chesapeake tobacco colonies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Jonathan Jackson (1679–1739) was born on the 11th of December, 1679, in Stepney Parish, Westmoreland County, in the Tidewater region of colonial Virginia. His birth fell during a formative period for the Chesapeake colonies, when Stepney Parish and its neighboring jurisdictions were organized around the Church of England and ordered chiefly by the rhythms of tobacco cultivation, riverine commerce along the Potomac, and the slow consolidation of planter society. Westmoreland County, established only a generation before his birth, was by then a settled community whose registers and parish books carefully recorded the comings and goings of its inhabitants — and through which the names of families such as the Jacksons descended into the historical record.

In the course of his life Jonathan married Rachel Atkinson, who became the mother of his recorded posterity. To this union was born Thomas Jackson (1728–1766), through whom the Jackson line passes forward into the compiler's ancestry. The relatively late date of Thomas's birth, when Jonathan was approaching his fiftieth year, suggests either earlier issue not preserved in the family record or a marriage formed in Jonathan's maturity; the surviving register notes only this son.

Jonathan's later years carried him north from his Virginia birthplace to the port city of Annapolis, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where he died on the 22nd of August, 1739, at the age of fifty-nine. Annapolis in that decade was the flourishing colonial capital of Maryland — a town of merchants, mariners, and provincial officials situated on the Severn River — and his presence there at the close of his life reflects the considerable mobility of Chesapeake families across the Potomac between the two colonies during the early eighteenth century.

Jonathan Jackson was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing among the earliest forebears in that branch whose dates and places have been preserved in the family archive.