Rebecca Caywood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rebecca Caywood (1775–1849), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, parentage, marriage to Josiah Hyten, her son William Caywood Hyten, and her death in Hendricks County, Indiana. Notable: late-life migration from the Chesapeake tidewater region to the Indiana frontier.

Rebecca Caywood was born in 1775 in Charles County, Maryland, into the tidewater Chesapeake society that lay along the Potomac in the closing year of British colonial rule. She entered the world as the colonies stood on the threshold of independence, and her childhood unfolded amid the unsettled aftermath of the Revolution, when Maryland's tobacco economy and Catholic-influenced gentry traditions remained deeply rooted in the lower counties.

She was a daughter of Stephen Thomas Cawood (also rendered Caywood, 1740–1802) and Priscilla McDaniel (1747–1824), a couple whose surnames place the family within the mingled English and Scots-Irish settlement of southern Maryland. The Caywood name itself, variably spelled across generations, was carried by several allied households in the Chesapeake before its westward dispersion.

Rebecca married Josiah Hyten, and from that union came William Caywood Hyten (1790–1882), whose middle name preserved his mother's family line and carried it forward through subsequent Hyten generations. The transmission of Rebecca's maiden surname as a given name to her son was a common practice of the period, by which families honored maternal lineage in an age when written records of women's lives were often sparse.

In the latter portion of her life Rebecca removed, with the broader Hyten kindred, to the Indiana frontier — part of the vast migration of Upper South and Chesapeake families who crossed the Ohio River in the first half of the nineteenth century in search of cheaper land and freer soil. Hendricks County, organized in 1824, was still a young settlement of clearings, log meetinghouses, and county-seat villages when she arrived in its vicinity. She died in July 1849 in Danville, the county seat, having outlived her husband and seen her son grow into the patriarch of the next generation.

Rebecca was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.