Tracy was born at Hartshead in 1814, the same year as her ill-fated sister Maria. A sickly child, she nevertheless showed great aptitude in all things mechanical. Little is known of her childhood, but her name crops up again in 1831 when she would have been seventeen. She had set up a clockmakers shop in Heptonstall, just the other side of the moors so beloved of her sisters.
In 1833, she had become so successful that she opened a gun shop in rented premises in Hebden Bridge. Her great enthusiasm for arms, militaria and huge explosions of all kinds soon led to her expanding this side of the business, and selling the clock shop. The money she gained from this sale enabled her to buy some woodland above Sowerby Bridge, where she used to run survival and battle courses. However, over zealous use of an excessive amount of gun cotton in a large mine led to a number of broken windows in the town and a landslip which blocked the main Halifax-Todmorden railway for some weeks.
After some unpleasantness, including the felling, one dark night, of all the trees on her land, and a week later the burning of her house, she left to seek her fortune. However, she never forgot her ill treatment, and on a flying visit some years later, she signalled her grudge by placing explosive charges under the Town Hall steps, a statue of the Mayor, and on the lock gates at Mytholmroyd. Sowerby Bridge was flooded for seven months before the damage could be repaired.
A somewhat portly girl, Tracy had difficulty finding ready made clothes off the peg, and so used to make her own. She had bought a large quantity of bankrupt stock from a local mill in1830, and it was from these bolts of multicoloured duffel that she manufactured her garb. Mainly browns and greens, these garments were the forerunners of the camouflage uniforms we know today.
In 1840, Tracy moved to Birmingham, and began work with Theyodor Grevski, the brilliant designer for a local gun firm, Enfields. During her time at Enfields, the creative couple invented the first breech-loading rifle, a very effective trench mortar, an early version of the high-explosive anti-tank round and produced two illegitimate girls. So far ahead of her time was Tracy that when, in 1914, a need for a reliable machine gun arose, it was to Enfields, and a locked filing cabinet in Tracy's former office that the Government turned.Therein were found plans which fitted the need perfectly, and Tracy's weapon was manufactured in huge numbers. However it was named after the locksmith who managed to eventually open Tracy's cabinet, a certain Norman Lewis, and not its gifted creator.
Tracy was killed at the age of forty in the Woolwich arsenal explosion, and her body was never recovered.
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A disgorger of the type often associated with the 'Crinoline Terrorists'