William Grenard

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Grenard (1776–1835), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Maryland, his parentage, his marriage to Ellen Price, his son John, his westward removal to Indiana, and the broader era context of the early American Republic and the settlement of the Old Northwest.

William Grenard (1776–1835) entered the world in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland, in the very year that the thirteen colonies declared their independence from the British Crown. His was thus a life that began with the new nation itself, and his earliest years unfolded amid the uncertainties of the Revolutionary War and the fragile peace that followed. He was the son of Paul Grenard (also rendered Grinard or Grinnard in various records), born about 1740, whose surname variants suggest the orthographic fluidity common to families of French or French-derived origin in the colonial Mid-Atlantic.

Baltimore in the late eighteenth century was a thriving port town, swelling rapidly with commerce, immigration, and the bustle of the Chesapeake trade. It was in this setting that William came of age, before the westward currents of the early Republic drew him, as they drew so many of his generation, away from the seaboard and into the interior.

William married Elle Milly Price, known familiarly as Ellen. To this union was born at least one son of record, John Grenard (1799–1867), who would carry the family line forward into the nineteenth century. The naming of the son in 1799 suggests that the family was by that date established as a household of its own, though whether still in Maryland or already in transit westward the surviving record does not specify.

William's life closed in 1835 in Wingate, Montgomery County, Indiana — a small settlement in the wooded uplands of west-central Indiana, then a relatively young state admitted to the Union only in 1816. The Indiana of the 1820s and 1830s was a frontier of recent clearings, log dwellings, and pioneer agriculture, and William's removal there placed him among the first generation of settlers who transformed the Old Northwest into farmland and community.

William was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.