Teague (Timothy) Tracy

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Teague (Timothy) Tracy (1650–1712), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Irish origins, immigration to colonial Maryland, marriage to Katherine Warnell, his son Teague/Tego Tracy, his death in Baltimore in 1712, and broader context regarding Irish emigration to the Chesapeake colonies in the late seventeenth century.

Teague (Timothy) Tracy, born about 1650 in Ireland, stood among the earliest forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandfather line to set foot upon American soil. His given name, Teague — an anglicization of the Irish Tadhg — bore unmistakable witness to his Gaelic origins, while the alternative "Timothy" reflected the common English rendering adopted by Irish settlers in the New World. He departed his native land during a period of profound upheaval, when Ireland endured the aftershocks of the Cromwellian settlement and the dispossessions that drove many of her sons across the Atlantic in search of livelihood and liberty.

The colony of Maryland, founded under the Calvert proprietorship as a refuge tolerant of Catholic faith, drew a considerable number of Irish immigrants during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many arrived as indentured servants, working tobacco lands along the Chesapeake before securing freedom and acreage of their own. It was in this colonial society — a frontier of small plantations, tidewater commerce, and gradually rising townships — that Teague Tracy made his life.

He was joined in marriage to Katherine Warnell, and of this union there came at least one known son, Teague (or Tego) Tracy, born in 1674. The repetition of the father's name in the next generation followed the venerable custom of the Irish, who carried ancestral names forward as living memorials. Curiously, father and son alike departed this life in the same year, 1712, suggesting either coincidence or perhaps a common affliction visited upon the household.

Teague the elder died on the eighteenth of June, 1712, in Baltimore City, Maryland — a settlement then but newly chartered and still in its infancy as the future great port of the Chesapeake. He thus belonged to the founding stratum of colonial Maryland, his life spanning the troubled close of the Stuart era and the opening years of the Hanoverian age.

Teague Tracy was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.