Namesakes
If you arrived at this site after searching for an Abraham Hyatt that’s not me, maybe you’re looking for one of these guys.
The Sea Captain: 1675
It may not be the most common name, but there are Abraham Hyatts going back to the late 1600s in the U.S. The first reference I’ve found is in 1675 when a Capt. Abraham Hyatt “was present at meetings of the Governor and Council of New York,” according to a genealogical history published in 1871.
The Loyalist: 1777
There were two Abraham Hyatts who fought on either side of the Revolutionary War. The Loyalist Abraham lived outside of Albany, New York. In 1777 he and several of his sons, one of who was also named Abraham, enlisted with John Burgoyne, the British officer who invaded the colonies from the north. After Burgoyne’s surrender, the Hyatts ended up in Canada. Gilbert, one of the sons, financed the building of a settlement that came to be known as Hyatt’s Mills (now a town called Sherbrooke). I haven’t found out what happened to the elder and junior Abrahams (after years of property rights battles Gilbert died nearly broke) but Hyatt is supposed to be a common name in the area today.
The Patriot: 1775
In 1702 an Abraham Hyatt shows up in land records near White Plains, about 30 miles north of New York City. In his will, which he wrote on what was probably his deathbed in 1731, he left his eldest son Abraham about 100 acres of land along what is now Highway 22. I don’t know what Abraham Jr. named his children, but in 1775 there was a 28-year-old man named Abraham Hyatt living in the same area. In July of that year the Revolutionary War was two months old and escalating quickly. That same month George Washington took command of the colonial forces, and Abraham met with about a 250 of his neighbors to sign an oath promising that they would “adopt and endeavor to carry into execution whatever measures may be recommended by the Continental Congress.”
The following year the president of that congress, John Hancock, signed Abraham’s military commission, making him a second lieutenant in the Army of the United States. It’s very likely that he fought in the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, the first American strategic victory of the war. He was made town clerk of New Castle in 1791 and died in 1820.
The Southerner: 1826
On March 7, 1826 (I was born on March 12), an Abraham Hyatt was born in Blount County, Alabama. By the 1850s he was the owner of several plots of land in a small valley bordered by green rolling hills. At that time, he, like most of his neighbors, owned no slaves. He was also the head of a large family; in 1866, seven of the 10 people living under his roof were women under the age of 20. When he died at home in 1894 (probably of tuberculosis), The Blount County News and Dispatch wrote that he was “a good citizen, an honest, industrious man, and had for many years been a member of the Antioch Baptist Church.”
The Rocket Scientist: 1958
Forty miles southwest of Blount County sits Birmingham, which is where another Abraham Hyatt grew up. He was born in the Ukraine in 1910 and arrived in Alabama when he was a young boy. I don’t know how he got the name; his brief biographies don’t say anything about his past except that he became a naturalized citizen in 1927.
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Special Committee on Space Technology, May 26, 1958
At the age of 23 he graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in aeronautical engineering. After World War II (he served in Europe as a Marine) he was one of the first people hired at a newly formed agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He worked there from 1958 to 1965, first as a director of the lunar launch vehicle program, and then as the head of NASA’s office of program planning and evaluation. After he retired in the mid-1970s, he moved to Southern California where he died in 1998.
In what is by far the oddest coincidence of all the Abraham Hyatts, his daughter’s maiden name and my mom’s married name is exactly the same: Sherry Hyatt.