William Turpin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Turpin (1752–1789), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, parentage, marriage to Nancy Ann Hanly, his daughter Sarah, his death in Kentucky, and the era context of colonial Maryland and frontier Kentucky settlement following the Revolutionary War.

William Turpin (1752–1789) was born on the second of January, 1752, in Coventry Parish, Somerset County, Maryland, a tidewater region whose Anglican parishes and tobacco economy shaped the rhythms of colonial life along the Chesapeake. He was a son of William Turpin (1700–1762) and Elizabeth Dixon (1715–1771), and entered a household already long established in the Maryland colony. He was but ten years of age at the death of his father, and a young man of nineteen when his mother passed in 1771, circumstances not uncommon among the children of the colonial gentry and yeomanry alike, where parental loss often hastened the assumption of adult responsibilities.

William came of age in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, a period in which Maryland's planters and freeholders were drawn increasingly into the contest between the Crown and the Colonies. In time he married Nancy Ann Hanly, and from their union came at least one daughter of record, Sarah Turpin (1777–1854), who would carry the family forward into the nineteenth century.

The latter portion of William's life witnessed the great westward movement that followed the close of the Revolutionary War. Veterans, land warrants, and the opening of the trans-Appalachian country drew thousands of families from the Tidewater and the Piedmont into Kentucky, then still a county of Virginia and only admitted as a state in 1792. It was in Clark County, Kentucky, on that newly opened frontier, that William Turpin died in 1789, at the comparatively early age of thirty-seven. The hardships of frontier settlement — disease, exposure, and the rigors of building a homestead in the wilderness — were the common lot of such pioneers.

William Turpin was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.