Rev. John H. Harryman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rev. John H. Harryman (1671–1711), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in colonial Baltimore County, Maryland, his marriage to Eleanor Norton, his son Georgÿ Haramÿn I, and the era context of late seventeenth-century Maryland. Notable: clerical title and early colonial Maryland roots.

Rev. John H. Harryman (1671–1711) was born on the 22nd of February 1671 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland, and there he likewise closed his earthly course on the 15th of February 1711, a few days shy of his fortieth year. His entire recorded life thus unfolded within the bounds of a single Maryland county — a circumstance not uncommon among the colonial-born generation, whose horizons were often fixed by the parish, the landing, and the family seat.

The Maryland of John Harryman's lifetime was a province still young and uneasily settled. Founded in 1632 under the Calvert proprietorship as a refuge for English Catholics, the colony had by the close of the seventeenth century passed through religious turbulence, the establishment of the Church of England as the official faith in 1692, and the steady spread of tobacco cultivation along the Chesapeake. Baltimore County in this era was a sprawling, lightly populated tract long predating the founding of Baltimore Town itself in 1729. That John bore the title of Reverend places him among the early clergy laboring in this frontier ecclesiastical landscape, where ministers were few and parishes vast.

He was joined in marriage to Eleanor Norton, and of this union is recorded a son, Georgÿ Haramÿn I, born in 1702 and living until 1774. The variant spelling of the surname in the next generation — Haramÿn, with its diaeresis — reflects the unsettled orthography of colonial records, in which a family name might be set down differently by each scribe and clerk who entered it upon the rolls. Through this son the Harryman line was carried forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the lineage gathered in the present register.

Rev. John H. Harryman was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.