Anna Beasley Cartwright
by
Stefan Bielinski


Anna/Hannah Beasley was born in Albany in 1726, the daughter of schoolteacher John Beasley and widow Lydia Dealy Van Benthuysen. With her brother, Henry, she grew up in an Albany home that included five siblings from her mother's previous marriage.

By the mid-1740s, she had married Richard Cartwright - an English-born opportunist who would become early Albany's most prominent innkeeper. Their large family of at least eight children born between 1747 and 1759 would grow up on the Southside - the heart of one of Albany's first neighborhoods.

by the 1760s, Cartwright's "Kings Arms" tavern was a center of English-speaking life in a bustling community that was undergoing fundamental changes with the influx of new people. Hannah Cartwright played the innkeeper's wife - as their holdings expanded to accommodate the newcomers who lived with them as boarders. Daughter of the English schoolmaster, like her husband she was a communicant of St. Peters Anglican church.

In August 1778, Hannah left her home and went with her husband and other family members to join the British in Canada.

Hanna Cartwright died in September 1795 and was buried in St. Paul's churchyard in Kensington, Ontario.

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notes

the people of colonial AlbanyThe life of Anna/Hannah Beasley Cartwright is CAP biography number 6509. This profile is derived chiefly from community-based resources and from documents related to her family's ordeal during the American Revolution.

"Southside" is a term used to describe that part of the first ward behind State and Court Streets. This area was first settled by former garrison soldiers during the early 1700s. The heart of "Southside" was the intersection of Green and Beaver Streets and it extended for a couple blocks in all directions. We define "Southside" as the neighborhood of ordinary houses south of State Street, east of South Pearl and west of Court or South Market Street!



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