Desire Tracy Grenard

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Desire Tracy Grenard (1804–1878), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Kentucky birth, parentage in the Tracy–Price household, marriage to John Grenard, motherhood, removal to Indiana, and era context of the early-republic frontier migration from Kentucky into the Wabash country.

Desire Tracy Grenard, born on the sixth day of January in the year 1804 in Mason County, Kentucky, came into the world during the early years of the American republic, when the bluegrass country still bore the marks of recent frontier settlement and the Ohio River served as the great artery of westward passage. She was the daughter of John Tracy (1775–1855) and Nancy Ann Price (1776–1859), a couple of the post-Revolutionary generation whose household, like many in northern Kentucky at that time, stood within reach of the river crossings that drew families steadily into the Old Northwest.

In the fullness of her young womanhood Desire was united in marriage to John Grenard, and from that union there is recorded a son, Elisha Grenard, born in 1827 and living until 1883. Though the family register preserves the name of but one child, his birth in the late 1820s places the household firmly within the generation that carried the Tracy and Grenard names out of Kentucky and into the rapidly settling counties of central Indiana.

Desire's later years were spent in Montgomery County, Indiana, a region opened to settlement only in the 1820s and grown, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, into a country of established farms, county seats, and Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. There, in that Wabash-country community, she lived to see her son into mature adulthood and to witness the great national upheaval of the Civil War and its long aftermath. She died on the twentieth day of January in the year 1878, at the age of seventy-four, having outlived both her parents by nearly two decades.

Desire was the compiler's 4× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.