The Hendons From Gunpowder River Grace Hendon Chancey

Tracking Colonial Maryland Families: The Gunpowder River Line

Gunpowder River Grace Hendon Chancey is the name I give to a particular cluster of records I keep running into when researching mid-18th century families in Baltimore County. It isn't a formal genealogical term anyone uses outside of forum threads. I just started using it because there are so many Hendon, Chancey, and related names showing up in the same river valley records that it helps to have shorthand for the group. The basic layout is straightforward. You have a set of land grants along the Gunpowder River dating back to the 1720s, probate records from the early 1750s, and a handful of marriage bonds that tie together several families. The Hendons were among the earliest English settlers in that stretch. Grace Hendon married into the Chancey line, and from there the records start branching into a lot of different counties. Baltimore, Harford, and sometimes Caroline if they moved south. I spent about three weeks last year digging through microfilm at the Maryland State Archives trying to nail down a specific birth date for a Grace Hendon. The problem was that there were two Grace Hendons in the same generation. One stayed near the river. The other moved toward the Pennsylvania border. I kept pulling the wrong file until I stopped looking at baptismal records and started cross-referencing land deeds. The deed names the grantor and the grantee with full descriptions of adjacent property lines. That's how I figured out which Grace was which. If you are only reading church records, you will hit that wall. Land records cut through it.

Here is what most people miss when they start on this line. Quaker records are not where you want to begin. The Hendons were originally from a Quaker family in Chester County, Pennsylvania. By the time they show up along the Gunpowder River, most of them had left the Society of Friends or were quietly ignoring meetings. The Quaker minute books list very few of them after about 1740. Instead, Anglican vestry records from St. Paul's Parish in Baltimore County have fuller entries. Baptisms, marriages, and burials all go there. The catch is that St. Paul's records for the 1730s and 1740s have a significant gap. Some pages were lost when the parish house flooded in 1862. You will need to fill those gaps with county court records. Another thing that trips people up is the spelling. Chancey shows up as Cancey, Chance, Chancy, and sometimes even Cansy in colonial documents. Hendon can also be Hendren or Hendrain. If you search with modern standardized spellings only, you will miss entire branches. I built a wildcard search string that runs across the Maryland State Archives database with all the variant endings and it picks up about 40 percent more matches than a standard name search. It takes longer to sort through the results, but it is worth it. If you are trying to download anything related to this line, there is no single source file. The records are scattered across several platforms. The Maryland State Archives has a digitized portion of the Baltimore County deed books, but it only covers certain volumes. FamilySearch has some of the probate records indexed, but the indexing is incomplete and the images are not all online. Ancestry has a collection called "Maryland, Baltimore County Land Records" that includes some of the relevant pages, but you need a subscription for the full view. I use a combination of all three. None of them alone is enough.

Here is a practical approach that actually works. Start with the land grants. Search the Maryland Land Records database for any Hendon or Chancey in Baltimore County between 1720 and 1760. Pull the full deed text for each result. Note the witness names. Witness names are where the family connections live. A deed might not mention a direct relationship, but the witnesses often are brothers or cousins. Build your family tree from the witness lists first, then go back and confirm with church records. The main bottleneck with this research is time. A full search through the deed books for one generation usually takes about four to six hours across all the platforms. If you have a specific ancestor in mind, you can narrow it down to about an hour and a half by starting with their known location and working outward. Without a starting point, it gets tedious fast. There is no shortcut around that part. If you hit a brick wall with Grace Hendon specifically, check the neighboring families. The Morrisons, the Giltners, and the Allisons appear alongside the Hendons in nearly every record from that period. Their papers sometimes contain information about Grace that the Hendon records do not. I found a marriage bond for Grace Hendon Chancey that was actually filed under a Morrison name because the groom was living with the Morrison family at the time. It would have been invisible if I had only searched Chancey.

The biggest limitation of this method is that colonial records are simply fragmentary. A lot of what you need may not exist anymore. Fire, flood, and neglect have taken out whole sections of the record base. If your ancestor disappeared from the Gunpowder River area after 1755, they may have moved to the Shenandoah Valley or further south, and the paper trail gets thinner the farther west you go. In those cases, switching to county court order books sometimes preserves enough to keep going, but sometimes it does not. Be honest with yourself about when a line has gone cold. For anyone starting out on this particular family cluster, I recommend downloading a blank pedigree chart and a separate worksheet for each variant spelling. Print them out. Physical paper helps when you are dealing with handwriting from the 1700s. You will write notes in the margins, circle names, and draw arrows. Digital notes tend to get messy in a way that makes them hard to revisit later. I have tried both ways. The paper method saves time in the long run even though it feels slower at first. There is also a compiled family history book that covers the Hendon line in this area. It is called "The Hendon Family of Maryland" and it was self-published a while back. It has some useful transcriptions, but it is not entirely reliable. The author made a few connections that later researchers have disproved. Use it as a starting point, not a source of truth. Always verify against the original records. The book is helpful for locating the right archives, but it will mislead you if you treat it as authoritative.

One final note on the Grace Hendon Chancey connection specifically. There is a common misconception that she married a William Chancey. The actual marriage bond I found lists a different first name. If you are building your tree around William, you are probably following an error that has been copied across multiple online family trees. I caught this myself after spending two months tracking the wrong line. Double check the bond before you commit to any descendant list. It is the kind of mistake that repeats itself everywhere once it gets planted.