Veazey William Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Veazey William Price (1745–1818), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, parentage, marriage, daughter Ellen, and his death in Kentucky, with era context on the Maryland tidewater and early Kentucky frontier settlement.

Veazey William Price was born in 1745 in Cecil County, Maryland, a tidewater county at the head of the Chesapeake Bay where tobacco cultivation, mixed agriculture, and Atlantic trade shaped colonial life. He was the son of Col. Thomas Joseph Price (1711–1796) and Eleanor Veazey (1717–1775), and from his mother's family he carried the Veazey surname forward as his own given name — a common practice in colonial Maryland for preserving maternal lineage among the planter and militia-officer classes to which his father belonged. The military title borne by his father suggests a household familiar with the obligations of provincial service in the decades leading up to the American Revolution, the conflict that would define Veazey's young adulthood.

He married Samantha Ann Barton, known within the family as "Sim," and together they had a daughter, Elle Milly Price, called Ellen, born in 1782 and living until 1844. Ellen would carry the family line forward into the next generation.

Like many families of his generation, Veazey eventually left the long-settled lands of the Chesapeake for the trans-Appalachian West. In the decades after the Revolution, Kentucky drew a steady stream of Maryland and Virginia families across the mountains in search of fresh land along the Ohio River valley. Maysville, in Mason County, sat on the Ohio itself and served as one of the principal gateways through which settlers entered the new state. It was there, on 18 March 1818, that Veazey William Price died at the age of seventy-three, having lived through the colonial period, the Revolution, the founding of the federal republic, and the opening of the western country.

Veazey William Price was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.