Teague\Tego Tracy

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Teague (Tego) Tracy (1674–1712), an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, parentage, marriage to Mary Jane James, and the single recorded son who carried forward the Tracy line. Notable: early colonial Chesapeake settler and an Irish-rooted name within an otherwise predominantly English and Germanic family tree.

Teague Tracy, also rendered in family records as Tego Tracy, was born in 1674 in England and died on the 18th of June, 1712, in Baltimore, Baltimore County, in the Province of Maryland. He was the son of Teague (sometimes called Timothy) Tracy, born about 1650, and of Katherine Warnell, born about 1645, who is recorded to have lived to the remarkable age of one hundred years. The given name Teague — an Anglicized form of the Irish Tadhg — points to Gaelic-Irish roots within the family, even as the household had become situated in England by the time of his birth.

Teague's lifetime spanned the late Stuart and early Hanoverian eras, a period in which the English Crown's Atlantic colonies drew increasing numbers of settlers across the ocean. Maryland in this generation was a proprietary colony of the Calvert family, an agricultural society oriented around the Chesapeake tobacco economy, with Baltimore County still largely a frontier of scattered plantations and small landholdings prior to the formal founding of Baltimore Town in 1729. It was within this colonial setting that Teague made his home and ended his days.

He married Mary Jane James, and from their union is recorded a son, Teague Bazil "Tego" Tracy, born in 1702 and living until 1752. Through this son the Tracy line continued in colonial America and ultimately descended into the broader family the present archive records. Teague the elder died in the same year as his father, 1712, at the relatively young age of thirty-eight, leaving his young son to carry the family forward in Maryland.

Teague Tracy was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.