Benjamin Sample Tracy

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Benjamin Sample Tracy (1730–1816), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, Episcopal baptismal record, parentage, marriage, son John, and the colonial-to-early-republic Maryland context in which he lived. Notable: long life spanning the American Revolution and early Federalist eras; baptized at historic Saint Paul's in Baltimore.

Benjamin Sample Tracy (1730–1816) entered the world on the fourteenth day of April in the year 1730, his birth recorded at Saint Paul Protestant Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland. That parish, among the oldest in the colony, served the planting families of the Patapsco region and stood as a fixture of Anglican life in colonial Maryland — a colony then still under proprietary governance of the Calvert family and shaped by a tobacco economy worked along the tidewater. Into this world of country parishes and Chesapeake commerce Benjamin was received.

He was a son of Teague Bazil Tracy, called "Tego" (1702–1752), whose Irish forename hints at the family's older roots before their settlement in the Maryland colony. Benjamin came of age in a province slowly turning from its colonial beginnings toward the upheavals of the later eighteenth century. By the time he reached middle life, the colonies had entered into the Revolution, and Maryland — divided in sympathy but a signatory to independence — furnished men and supplies to the patriot cause. Benjamin lived through these stirring years and saw the new republic established and steadied through its first generation.

He was united in marriage to Mary Tracy, and of that union came a son, John Tracy (1775–1855), born in the very year that fighting commenced at Lexington and Concord. Through John the Tracy line was carried forward into the nineteenth century and onward into the families that would eventually meet the Hytens.

Benjamin's long life closed in 1816 in Hartford, Maryland, after some eighty-six years — a remarkable span that bridged the late colonial period, the Revolution, the framing of the Constitution, and the second war with Britain. He rests among the early forebears of the family in his native Maryland.

Benjamin Sample Tracy was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.