Nancy Ann Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nancy Ann Price (1776–1859), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Revolutionary-era Maryland, marriage to John Tracy, motherhood, westward removal to Illinois, and death in Champaign County. Notable: born in Frederick, Maryland the very month of American independence; concluded her life on the Illinois prairie.

Nancy Ann Price (1776–1859) entered the world on the 27th of May, 1776, in the town of Frederick, Frederick County, Maryland — a place and moment of singular historical weight, for she was born scarcely five weeks before the Continental Congress, gathered not far to the north in Philadelphia, would proclaim the independence of the American colonies. Frederick in that revolutionary year was a thriving market town of mixed German and English settlement, situated at the gateway between the Tidewater and the frontier, and it was into this restive, hopeful country that Nancy drew her first breath.

In the course of her young womanhood she became the wife of John Tracy, and the union was blessed with at least one daughter whose name is preserved in the family register: Desire Tracy, born in 1804, who in due season married into the Grenard family and lived until 1878. Through Desire the Tracy and Price blood was carried forward into the lineage from which the compiler descends.

Like so many families of her generation, Nancy did not remain in the Maryland of her birth. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a vast migration of eastern families across the Alleghenies and into the new states of the Old Northwest, drawn by fertile land and the promise of a wider horizon. Nancy, in the company of her family, eventually removed to the prairies of central Illinois, settling at last in Urbana, in Champaign County — a country that had been wilderness in her youth and was, by the close of her life, knitted by railroads and ripening into the breadbasket of the republic.

There, in Urbana, Nancy Ann Price Tracy died on the 3rd of November, 1859, having lived eighty-three years that spanned the founding of the nation and the eve of its great Civil War. She stands in the family as a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.