George Veazey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is George Veazey (1684–1760), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in St. Stephen's Parish, Cecil County, Maryland, his marriage to Katherine Beard, his daughter Eleanor, and the colonial Chesapeake context of his lifetime.

George Veazey, born about 1684 in St. Stephen's Parish, Cecil County, Maryland, lived the whole of his long life within the bounds of that same parish, where he died on the 2nd of September, 1760, at approximately seventy-six years of age. His life thus spanned the closing decades of the seventeenth century and more than half of the eighteenth — a remarkable span for a man born in the colonial Chesapeake, where life expectancies were often curtailed by malarial fevers and the rigors of frontier settlement.

The Cecil County of George's birth was a young community on Maryland's upper Eastern Shore, a region of tobacco plantations, tidewater creeks, and small Anglican parishes only recently organized. St. Stephen's Parish, where he was both born and buried, served as the spiritual and civil heart of the surrounding planter community. To remain in the parish of one's birth across an entire lifetime was not unusual in this era, when land tenure, kinship, and parish identity bound families closely to the soil.

George married Katherine Beard, who in marriage took the name Veazey. Of their household, the record preserves their daughter Eleanor Veazey, born in 1717 and living until 1775. Eleanor would have come of age in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, in the years before the political upheavals that would transform the colonies in which her parents had so deeply rooted themselves.

George's death in 1760 placed him just on the near side of the great changes to come: the French and Indian War had only recently concluded, and the tensions that would lead to American independence were beginning to stir. He did not live to see them. He was laid to rest in the parish that had encompassed his entire earthly course.

George Veazey was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, the father of Eleanor Veazey through whom the line descends.