Nancy Ann Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nancy Ann Price (1776–1859), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth on the eve of American independence, marriage to John Tracy, motherhood, westward migration ending in Illinois, and her death at age 83. Notable: born in Frederick, Maryland in the very month of the Declaration of Independence.

Nancy Ann Price (1776–1859) entered the world on the 27th of May 1776 in Frederick, Maryland, scarcely five weeks before the Continental Congress declared the independence of the American colonies. The town of Frederick, then one of the more populous inland settlements of the Maryland colony, was a crossroads of German, English, and Scots-Irish families pressing westward from the Tidewater toward the Appalachian frontier, and it was in this stirring atmosphere of revolution and migration that Nancy's earliest years unfolded.

In the course of time she became the wife of John Tracy, with whom she made her household and raised at least one daughter recorded in the family register: Desire Tracy, born in 1804, who in womanhood took the name Grenard and lived until 1878. The naming of a daughter "Desire" reflected an older Anglo-American devotional tradition still current in the early Republic, by which abstract virtues were bestowed upon female children as given names.

The arc of Nancy's life traced the great westward movement of her generation. Born in the Maryland piedmont in the year of independence, she ended her days far to the west in Urbana, Champaign County, Illinois, where she died on the 3rd of November 1859, having attained the venerable age of eighty-three years. The Illinois prairies to which she or her family eventually removed had, at the time of her birth, lain wholly beyond the bounds of the United States; by the time of her death they were settled farmland threaded by the new railroads, and the nation she had been born into was itself less than two years from the rupture of civil war.

Nancy Ann Price stood, therefore, as a witness across one of the most transformative epochs of American history. She is remembered in this register as a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler, in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line of descent.