Barry, Catherine A.
Birth
Death
First Name
Middle Name
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Person Biography
Catherine A. Barry was born Catherine Armistead Mason in 1793 to Stevens Thomson Mason and Mary Elizabeth Armistead of Raspberry Plain.
In 1812, Catherine married William Taylor Barry, a Democratic politician and judge from Kentucky, in whose account she is mentioned in the Mason family manuscript account book. Catherine Barry sold her husband the share of the Raspberry Plain plantation that she had inherited from her late father. William, in turn, sold that share to Armistead T. Mason. Upon her mother Mary Mason’s death in 1825, Catherine inherited one of Mary’s enslaved women, named Milley.
At the time of Catherine’s first marriage, William Barry had just completed a term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives; he went on to serve two terms as a U.S. Senator. Catherine had two sons, and she also cared for William’s daughter from his first marriage. She and William were married for a total of twenty-three years before his death in 1835 in Liverpool, England, where he died while traveling to his new post as the U.S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain.
Catherine Barry next married Thomas Hicks (or Hickey). She died on 23 April 1873 around the age of seventy-nine in Newport, Kentucky, and was buried in Southgate, Kentucky.
By Odessa Lamborn
