Eleanor Norton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Eleanor Norton (1678–1733), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Baltimore County, Maryland, her marriage to Rev. John H. Harryman, her son George Harryman I, and the colonial Maryland era in which she lived.

Eleanor Norton (1678–1733) was born in 1678 in Baltimore County, in the Province of Maryland, and there she lived out the whole of her fifty-five years, departing this life on the eleventh day of June, 1733, in the First district of that same county. She stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a ninth great-grandmother, one of the earliest forebears traceable in that branch of the Hyten kindred.

The Baltimore County into which Eleanor was born was, in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, still a young and largely frontier settlement. Maryland had been chartered in 1632 as a proprietary colony under the Calvert family, and by Eleanor's lifetime the colony was transitioning from its early Catholic founding character toward an Anglican establishment, formally adopted in 1692. Settlement was sparse, tobacco was the dominant staple of the colonial economy, and life along the Chesapeake remained shaped by waterways, plantations, and parish life rather than by towns of any consequence.

Eleanor married the Reverend John H. Harryman, whose clerical title situates the family within the religious leadership of colonial Maryland in an age when ministers occupied positions of considerable local consequence. Of their union is recorded the son George Harryman I, born in 1702 and living until 1774, through whom the line descends into the generations that would eventually carry the family westward and forward into the compiler's own ancestry.

Eleanor's full span of years bridged the late Stuart period of English colonial rule through the reigns of William and Mary, Anne, and into the Georgian era; she died in the same year that the colony of Georgia, the last of the thirteen, was founded to her south. She did not live to see the children of her son come of age, but through George the Harryman name and her own blood were carried into the long line of descent.

Eleanor was the compiler's ninth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.