Richard G Jones, II

Richard G Jones, II, who lived from 1610 to 1683, occupies an early and formative position in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, standing as a 10× great-grandparent and one of the earliest forebears whose name has been preserved in the Hyten family record. His life spanned the turbulent decades of the English Civil War, the founding of the American colonies, and the first generations of European settlement along the eastern seaboard, and the documentary traces of his life reflect those Atlantic crossings: his birth and death are recorded in association with both Devon, in the southwest of England, and the colonial settlements of Connecticut and Shamokin in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.

He was the son of Richard Jones, who died in 1681, and Ann Jefferies, who died in 1644. The early loss of his mother, occurring when he was a man in his thirties, would have come during the very years in which England itself was riven by civil conflict between Crown and Parliament — a period in which many English families of middling and gentle station were dispersed by political and religious upheaval, and in which emigration to the American colonies accelerated markedly.

The Pennsylvania associations attached to his record are notable, for Shamokin lay along the Susquehanna River in a region not opened to substantial European settlement until late in his life and afterward; the family's presence in or connection to that locality places them among the earlier English-speaking arrivals to the mid-Atlantic frontier. Connecticut, by contrast, had been settled by English Puritans from the 1630s onward, and a colonial life rooted there would have placed him within one of the most established Puritan commonwealths of New England.

Of his children, the family record preserves Richard Jones (1651–1714), through whom the line continued and through whom the Hyten descent ultimately flows. Richard G Jones, II was the compiler's 10× great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.