William Turpin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Turpin (1700–1762), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Dorchester, Maryland, his marriage to Elizabeth Dixon, his son William, and colonial Chesapeake era context. Notable: lifelong Dorchester County resident in tidewater Maryland during the colonial period.

William Turpin (1700–1762) was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, and died there on the 19th of January, 1762, having spent the whole of his sixty-one years within the bounds of that tidewater county on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 7× great-grandparent, an early colonial forebear whose life unfolded a full half-century before American independence.

Dorchester County in Turpin's lifetime was a thinly settled landscape of marsh, river, and field, set along the eastern reach of the Chesapeake Bay. The region had been organized as a county in 1669, and through the early eighteenth century it grew slowly as planters, watermen, and tradesmen took up land along the Choptank, Nanticoke, and Transquaking rivers. Tobacco remained the principal staple of the surrounding Chesapeake economy, while the lower Eastern Shore counties also turned increasingly to corn, wheat, and the produce of the bay. It was within this colonial Maryland setting — under the proprietary government of the Lords Baltimore — that William Turpin lived out his years.

He married Elizabeth Dixon, and from this union descended his son, also named William Turpin, who was born in 1752 and died in 1789, carrying the family line forward into the era of the American Revolution and the early Republic. The repetition of the name William across generations was a common practice among colonial families of the Chesapeake and marked the continuity of household and inheritance from father to son.

William Turpin did not live to see the political upheavals that would so transform his colony into a state; he died in 1762, more than a decade before the first stirrings of revolution. His life thus belongs wholly to the colonial chapter of the family's American story, anchoring the Turpin name firmly in Dorchester, Maryland, in the first half of the eighteenth century.

William was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.