Samantha "Sim" Ann Barton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samantha 'Sim' Ann Barton (1751–1801), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, her mother Ann Hitchcock, her marriage to Veazey William Price, her daughter Ellen Price, her death in Kentucky, and the colonial-to-frontier era context of her life.

Samantha Ann Barton, known within the family as 'Sim,' was born on the 26th of January, 1751, in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland — then a thriving colonial port on the Patapsco River and one of the most rapidly expanding commercial centers in the British North American colonies. She was the daughter of Ann Hitchcock (1722–1792), through whom she inherited a Maryland colonial lineage rooted in the Chesapeake region during the decades preceding the American Revolution.

Samantha came of age in a remarkable era. Her childhood and young womanhood unfolded against the backdrop of the French and Indian War, the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, and the Revolutionary War itself. Maryland families of her generation witnessed firsthand the transformation of colonial society into a new republic, and the social customs, religious life, and economic structures of the Chesapeake shaped the world in which she was raised.

In time Samantha married Veazey William Price. From this union came at least one recorded daughter, Elle Milly Price, called 'Ellen,' who was born in 1782 and lived until 1844, carrying the Barton-Price line forward into the next century.

Like many families of the post-Revolutionary generation, the Bartons and Prices joined the great westward migration across the Appalachians. Samantha's later years were spent on the Kentucky frontier, and she died in 1801 at Maysville, in Mason County, Kentucky — a bustling Ohio River landing that had become one of the principal gateways for settlers pressing into the trans-Appalachian West. She was approximately fifty years of age at her death. The Maysville of her final years was a rough but rising river town, the point of entry for thousands of pioneer families bound for the interior of Kentucky and the Northwest Territory.

Samantha 'Sim' Ann Barton stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 6× great-grandmother, a colonial-born matriarch whose life bridged tidewater Maryland and the Kentucky frontier.