Col. Thomas Joseph Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Col. Thomas Joseph Price (1711–1796), a seventh great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maryland, parentage, marriage to Eleanor Veazey, son Veazey William Price, and historical context of eighteenth-century Cecil County. Notable: military title of Colonel and lifelong residence in Cecil County, Maryland, spanning the colonial and early Republic eras.

Col. Thomas Joseph Price (1711–1796) was born on the twenty-ninth of March, 1711, in the small Chesapeake settlement of Earleville, situated in Cecil County, Maryland. He was the son of Thomas Esau Price (1675–1764) and Mary Price (1687–1736), placing him among the second and third generations of an established Maryland family whose roots reached back into the proprietary colonial period under the Calverts. His mother died when he was a young man of about twenty-five, while his father, who would survive into his late eighties, lived long enough to see Thomas Joseph well into middle age.

Cecil County in the early eighteenth century was a region of tobacco plantations, tidewater commerce, and mixed Anglican and Quaker settlement, lying at the head of the Chesapeake Bay near the Pennsylvania boundary. The county served as a crossroads between the Delaware Valley to the north and the wider Maryland tidewater to the south, and its landed gentry frequently held both civic responsibilities and militia commissions. The military rank of Colonel borne by Thomas Joseph Price reflects a station of regional authority customary among the propertied men of the colony.

He married Eleanor Veazey, joining the Price line to another long-established Cecil County family of English origin. From this union came at least one recorded son, Veazey William Price (1745–1818), whose given name preserved his mother's maiden surname in the customary fashion of the period — a practice common among colonial families seeking to honor maternal lineage.

Thomas Joseph Price lived through the great transformations of his century: the colonial wars, the imperial crisis, the American Revolution, and the founding of the new Republic. He died in 1796 in Cecil County, the same ground on which he had been born some eighty-five years earlier, having witnessed nearly the entire arc of British and early American Maryland.

Col. Thomas Joseph Price was the compiler's seventh great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.