Teague Bazil "Tego" Tracy

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Teague Bazil 'Tego' Tracy (1702–1752), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maryland, parentage, his eventual relocation to North Carolina, his son Benjamin Sample Tracy, and the colonial-era context of his life. Notable: an early-18th-century colonial American ancestor bearing an Irish given name.

Teague Bazil Tracy, called Tego after the fashion of his father before him, was born on the first day of October in 1702 in St. James Parish, Anne Arundel County, in the colony of Maryland. He was the son of Teague (or Tego) Tracy, born 1674 and dying when his namesake was but ten years of age in 1712, and of Mary Jane James, born 1680, who survived her husband by some thirty-five years and lived until 1747.

The Irish given name Teague, anglicized from the Gaelic Tadhg, marked the household as one of evident Irish descent — a heritage not uncommon in early Maryland, which under the proprietorship of the Lords Baltimore had drawn settlers of varied backgrounds, including Irish Catholics seeking the comparative tolerance afforded by that colony. Anne Arundel County in the opening years of the eighteenth century was a region of tobacco plantations and tidewater commerce, lying along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and St. James Parish stood among its established Anglican divisions.

In the course of his life Teague Bazil removed southward, as did many families of his generation seeking new lands along the colonial frontier. By the time of his death in 1752 he was settled in North Carolina, then a colony of expanding backcountry settlement drawing migrants from the older tidewater regions of Virginia and Maryland.

Of his union there is recorded a son, Benjamin Sample Tracy, born in 1730 and living to the considerable age of eighty-six, dying in 1816. Through this son the Tracy line passed forward into the generations that would, in time, become joined to the Hyten lineage.

Teague Bazil Tracy died in 1752 in North Carolina, at the age of forty-nine or fifty. He stands in the family record as a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.