Katherine Beard\ Veazey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Katherine Beard Veazey (1698–1775), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, parentage, marriage to George Veazey, her daughter Eleanor, and the historical context of Cecil County, Maryland in the early 18th century.

Katherine Beard Veazey (1698–1775) lived the whole of her seventy-seven years in Cecil County, Maryland, where she was born in 1698 and where, in 1775, she was at last laid to rest. She was the daughter of Jacob Beard, born about 1650, and through that paternal line she enters the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) ancestry as an eighth great-grandmother.

Cecil County, situated at the head of the Chesapeake Bay, was in Katherine's lifetime a thinly settled tidewater country of tobacco fields, tidal creeks, and small landings. The county had been formally erected in 1674, only a generation before her birth, and through the early decades of the eighteenth century it remained a mingling ground of English, Scots-Irish, and Welsh settlers, with Anglican and Quaker meetings alike taking root along its waterways. To grow up there in the first quarter of the 1700s was to know a society still very much under the proprietary government of the Calvert family, oriented toward the Bay and its coastwise trade.

Katherine married George Veazey, joining her line to a Veazey family long associated with Cecil County. Of that union, the family record preserves a daughter, Eleanor Veazey, born in 1717 and, by a coincidence striking to the genealogist, departing this life in the same year as her mother, 1775. Mother and daughter thus passed from the colonial Maryland of their birth on the very threshold of the American Revolution — a transformation neither would live to see resolved.

Katherine's death in 1775 closed a life bounded entirely by the place of her birth, a not uncommon pattern among colonial Maryland women of her generation, whose worlds were measured in the parishes, plantations, and landings of a single county. She stands in the family record as Katherine Beard Veazey, an eighth great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather line.