TRACY

TRACY. This famous Norman family borrowed their surname fromTraci-Boccage in the arrondissement of Caen, called in documents of the XL cent. Traceiura. They came hither at the Conquest, and were subsequently lords of Barnstaple, in Devonshire. The parishes, &c., of Woolcombe-Tracy, Bovi-Tracy, Minet-Tracy, Bradford-Tracy, &c., in Devonshire, derived their suffixes from this family. Fuller's "Worthies, i., 558. The male line failed at an early period, but the heiress married John de Sudley, whose son William adopted the maternal surname. This personage has by some genealogists been considered one of the four assassins of Thomas-a-Becket, though others stoutly deny it, and assert that there were other William de Tracys living contemporaneously with him. Whoever the assassin was, a curse was said to attach to him and to his seed for ever, namely, that wherever he or they went, by land or sea, the wind should blow in a direction opposite to that of their course. Hence the well-known traditional couplet —

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.