Elle Milly "Ellen" PRICE

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elle Milly 'Ellen' Price (1782–1844), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, parentage, marriage to William Grenard, known issue, and her later years in frontier Indiana. Notable: born in Frederick County, Maryland during the Revolutionary era; died in Montgomery County, Indiana.

Elle Milly Price, known familiarly as Ellen, was born in 1782 in Frederick, Frederick County, Maryland, into the household of Veazey William Price (1745–1818) and Samantha Ann Barton (1751–1801), the latter affectionately called 'Sim.' Her arrival into a Maryland family in the closing years of the American Revolution placed her among that first generation of children to grow up under the new republic, when the Piedmont counties of Maryland were settling into a quieter agrarian rhythm after the upheavals of the war.

Ellen was united in marriage to William Grenard, and from this union came at least one recorded son, John Grenard, born in 1799 and living until 1867. That John's birth fell when Ellen was but seventeen years of age suggests an early marriage, a circumstance not uncommon among the rural families of the upper Chesapeake in that period.

In the decades following her marriage, Ellen's life followed the westering arc taken by so many Maryland and Virginia households of her generation. The opening of the Ohio Valley and the public lands of the old Northwest Territory drew families across the Alleghenies in steady succession from the 1810s onward, and Montgomery County, Indiana — organized in 1823 — became home to many such migrants. It was in this Indiana settlement, at the village of Wingate, that Ellen ended her days on the 29th of November, 1844, at the age of sixty-two. She had lost her mother in 1801 and her father in 1818, and she herself outlived both by decades, witnessing in her own lifetime the transformation of her family from coastal Marylanders to inland pioneers of the Wabash country.

Ellen was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as a maternal link bridging the Price household of colonial Maryland to the Grenard descendants who carried the family westward into Indiana.