Mary Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Price (1687–1736), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Pennsylvania, parentage through the Calvert line, marriage to Thomas Esau Price, motherhood of Col. Thomas Joseph Price, and her death in Maryland. Notable: late-seventeenth-century Quaker-era Pennsylvania birth and Chesapeake colonial settlement.

Mary Price, born on the nineteenth of December, 1687, in Chester, Pennsylvania, and laid to rest on the seventeenth of January, 1736, in the colony of Maryland, occupies an early and venerable place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, standing as an eight-times great-grandmother to the present generation. Her life unfolded across two of the most consequential of the English American colonies during the closing decades of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth.

She was the daughter of John Calvert of Stanmills (1648–1699), whose surname carried weight in the Chesapeake world of that era, the Calverts being long associated with the proprietary settlement of Maryland. Mary entered the world in Chester, one of the earliest English settlements in Pennsylvania, founded by the Swedes as Upland and renamed under William Penn's stewardship only a few years before her birth. The Chester of her infancy was a young town of Quaker influence and modest river commerce, situated on the Delaware and pressed close to the wider Atlantic trade.

In the fullness of time Mary married Thomas Esau Price, and from this union there came Col. Thomas Joseph Price (1711–1796), whose long life would span nearly the whole of the eighteenth century and reach into the early years of the American Republic. Through this son, the line of descent passed forward into later generations of the family.

Mary's removal from Pennsylvania to Maryland, where she ended her days at the age of forty-eight, was a passage made by many colonial families of that period, as the bonds of kinship, land, and tobacco-trade drew settlers southward into the Chesapeake. She died in 1736, four decades before the colonies of her birth and burial would together declare their independence.

Mary was the compiler's eight-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.