Eleanor Veazey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eleanor Veazey (1717–1775), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Cecil County, Maryland, her parentage, her marriage to Col. Thomas Joseph Price, and her son Veazey William Price. Era context: colonial Chesapeake Maryland in the eighteenth century.

Eleanor Veazey (1717–1775) was born in Cecil County, Maryland, in 1717, and died there on the 18th of April, 1775, at the age of fifty-seven. Her life thus unfolded entirely within the bounds of colonial Cecil, on the upper Chesapeake — a region settled in the seventeenth century at the confluence of English, Welsh, and Quaker influences, and given to tobacco husbandry, tidewater commerce, and the slow rise of provincial gentry along the Elk and Sassafras rivers.

She was the daughter of George Veazey (1684–1760) and Katherine Beard Veazey (1698–1775). The Veazey name had been established in Cecil for at least a generation by the time of Eleanor's birth, and her parents' long lifespans — her mother's nearly matching her own to the year — speak to a settled and prospering household in the Maryland colony of the early eighteenth century.

Eleanor married Col. Thomas Joseph Price, whose military title indicates service in the colonial militia, an institution central to the social standing of leading Chesapeake families in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. The Maryland militia of that era drew its officers from the landed and propertied class, and a colonelcy carried both martial and civic weight in the county.

From this union came at least one recorded son, Veazey William Price (1745–1818), whose given name preserved his mother's family line in the manner customary among colonial Maryland households. Through him the Veazey blood passed into later generations of the Price family and, in time, into the broader lineage gathered in this register.

Eleanor died in April of 1775, only days after the opening engagements of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord, though she did not live to see the conflict reach the Chesapeake. Eleanor was the compiler's seventh great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.