Alexander Potter

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alexander Potter (1669–1765), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Tyrone, his long life in Ulster, his marriage to Mary Sipple Currier, and his son John. Notable: an Ulster Scots-Irish ancestor whose descendants would later cross to colonial America.

Alexander Potter (1669–1765) stood among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a man whose ninety-six years spanned a remarkable arc of Irish and British history. He was born in 1669 at Magheracross, in the parish lands joining County Tyrone and County Fermanagh, in what is today Northern Ireland. His birth came only a generation after the great Ulster Plantation had reshaped the north of Ireland with Scottish and English settlers, and his lifetime would witness the Williamite War, the Siege of Derry, the Act of Union of Scotland and England, and the early Hanoverian succession — a turbulent era for the Protestant communities of Ulster.

Alexander was united in marriage to Mary Sipple Currier Potter, whose own name suggests a previous marriage and the blended families common to the long-lived households of the period. Of their union, the family record preserves the name of one son, John Potter, born in 1705 and dying in 1758. John's lifespan — entirely contained within his father's own — speaks to the extraordinary length of Alexander's days, for the elder Potter outlived his son by some seven years.

Alexander's death came in June 1765 at Killinchy, in County Down, on the shores of Strangford Lough. That he ended his life in Down rather than the Tyrone–Fermanagh borderlands of his birth indicates a movement eastward across Ulster at some point in his long life, a not uncommon pattern among the Scots-Irish families of the era as they sought land, kin, or congregation. The Killinchy district was a stronghold of Presbyterian settlement, and the mid-eighteenth century there saw many such families weighing emigration to the American colonies — a passage that descendants of this line would in time undertake.

Alexander Potter was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.