Mary Tracy [5]

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Tracy (1745–1825), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, marriage to Benjamin Sample Tracy, motherhood of John Tracy, and death at Havre de Grace. Notable: her life spanned the colonial, Revolutionary, and early Republic eras of Chesapeake Maryland.

Mary Tracy (1745–1825) was born in the colony of Maryland in the year 1745, three decades before the American Revolution would transform the thirteen colonies into a new republic. Her life, spanning eighty years, traced an arc through some of the most formative chapters of early American history — from the late colonial period under British rule, through the Revolutionary War, the framing of the Constitution, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Maryland in the mid-eighteenth century was a colony of tobacco fields, Chesapeake commerce, and a mingled population of English, Scots-Irish, German, and African inhabitants, with the port towns of the upper Bay serving as gateways for goods and migrants alike.

Mary was united in marriage to Benjamin Sample Tracy, and from their union came a son, John Tracy, born in 1775 — the very year that fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. John would live until 1855, carrying the family line forward into the era of westward expansion.

Mary spent her final years in Havre de Grace, a town situated at the mouth of the Susquehanna River where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, in Harford County, Maryland. The town held strategic importance during the War of 1812, having been raided and burned by British forces in May of 1813 — an event Mary, then in her late sixties, would have lived through as a resident of the region. She died in Havre de Grace in 1825, at the age of approximately eighty.

Though the documentary record preserved here is spare, Mary Tracy stands as one of the early American matriarchs of the Hyten line, her lifetime bridging colonial Maryland and the young republic. She was a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.