Mary Jane JAMES

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Jane James (1680–1747), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her parentage, her marriage to Teague Tracy, her son and lineage continuation, her death in Baltimore, and the broader context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonial life.

Mary Jane James (1680–1747) was born on the fifth of November, 1680, at Manny, in Somerset, Maryland, then a province of British Colonial America. She entered the world as the daughter of Richard James (1649–1685) and Eleanor Honor Orme (1649–1707), a household that took root in the tidewater country of the Chesapeake during the proprietary era of the Calvert family. The Maryland of her infancy was a young colony of scattered plantations, indented creeks, and tobacco fields, where Catholic and Protestant settlers lived side by side under a charter that, though strained, still gestured toward religious toleration. Her father's death in 1685, when Mary Jane was scarcely five years of age, left her mother to navigate widowhood in this still-frontier society — a circumstance not uncommon among colonial families of that generation, when life expectancy was tempered by fever, hardship, and the rigors of an unsettled land.

Mary Jane in time was joined in marriage to Teague Tracy, sometimes recorded as Tego Tracy, whose given name betokens an Irish origin amid the increasingly mixed population of the Maryland colony. Of this union there is preserved in the family record a son, Teague Bazil "Tego" Tracy (1702–1752), through whom the line of descent carried forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the compiler's own ancestry.

The later years of Mary Jane's life were passed in Baltimore, where she died in 1747 at the age of sixty-six or sixty-seven — a considerable span for a woman of her century. By the time of her passing, Baltimore was emerging from a modest port settlement into a place of growing commerce, though the bustling city of later memory still lay in the future. She had lived through the reigns of four English monarchs and witnessed Maryland's transformation from proprietary colony to royal province and back again.

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