Henry Hooper Biography

With generous support from the Friends of the Maryland State Archives ~ and especially from Ret. United States Court of Appeals Judge Levin H. Campbell ~ Jean spent much of 2011 to 2015 exploring the career of Henry Hooper, a resident of Dorchester County, Maryland, and Speaker of the Lower House of Maryland’s General Assembly from 1754 to 1763.  A good deal of the research is distilled into her article in the Summer 2015 issue of the Maryland Historical Magazine: “The Best Justice of the Peace in the Province”: Colonel Henry Hooper (ca. 1687-1767).

In the course of investigating Hooper’s background and early career, Jean gathered information about Hooper’s extended family and its connections to many of the Eastern Shore’s prominent families.

The research encompassed a wide variety of sources.  Jean combed through the wills, estate inventories, and administration accounts for every Hooper, Denwood, Woolford, and Ennalls decedent (and most of their in-laws as well).  She read all of the extant Dorchester County court records and followed every Hooper-related entry in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century provincial records published in the Archives of Maryland Online.  She constructed tract histories for all the properties bought or inherited by Hooper and his relatives using the provincial patent records and the land records of Dorchester and Somerset counties.  And she pursued the Hooper family’s mercantile connections with forays into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and records held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom (with key assistance from John C. Coombs).

As a result of all this digging about, we have at hand a great deal of information about Henry Hooper and his kin — not to mention a lot of experience gathering data from these disparate sources.  Questions?  Please contact us!