Jacob Beard

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jacob Beard (1650–unknown), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his approximate birth year, his place as a progenitor in the Beard line, his daughter Katherine Beard Veazey, and historical context for late seventeenth-century colonial America in which his life unfolded.

Jacob Beard, born in 1650, stands among the earliest forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a 9× great-grandfather whose life spanned the latter half of the seventeenth century. The year and circumstances of his death have not been preserved in the family record, and much of what might once have been known of his personal history has been lost to the passage of time and the thinness of colonial-era documentation. What endures is the line he established and the daughter through whom his name descends into the family book.

The second half of the seventeenth century, into which Jacob was born, was an age of unsettled frontiers and slow institution-building across the English colonies of North America and the British Isles alike. Parish registers, where they were kept at all, were often imperfect; many ordinary householders of the period left behind little more than a baptism, a marriage bond, or the mention of a child's name in a probate file. It is in keeping with the era that Jacob Beard should be remembered chiefly through his offspring rather than through any record of his own making.

Of his children, the family register preserves the name of Katherine Beard, born in 1698 and surviving to 1775, who married into the Veazey family and carried the Beard blood forward into the eighteenth century. Through Katherine the line continues down the generations into the compiler's own ancestry. That a daughter born when Jacob was approaching fifty should live to the age of seventy-seven speaks to the long reach of a single life across the colonial generations, and it is by such bridges that the family thread is held intact.

Jacob Beard was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.