Rev Henry Lewis Darnall

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall (1765–1846), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, Darnall and McDonald parentage, marriage to Sarah Turpin, his daughter Elizabeth, and his death in Indiana. Notable: clerical title 'Reverend,' colonial Maryland origin, and westward migration to frontier Indiana.

Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall (1765–1846) entered the world on the eighth of November, 1765, at Poplar Hill in Prince George's County, Maryland, then still a colonial possession of the British Crown. He was the son of John Watts Darnall (1736–1798) and Mary Ann McDonald, sometimes recorded as McDaniel (1745–1824), placing him within the well-established Darnall lineage of tidewater Maryland — a region whose Catholic and Anglican gentry had been settled along the Potomac since the seventeenth century, and whose plantation society shaped much of his early life. Henry came of age during the upheaval of the American Revolution, his boyhood unfolding amid the political ferment that transformed the colonies into a new republic.

In the course of his life he took for his wife Sarah Turpin, and of this union came at least one recorded daughter, Elizabeth — affectionately styled 'Eliza' — born in 1802 and surviving until 1876. Henry bore the title 'Reverend,' marking him as a man of the cloth at a period when itinerant preaching and the Second Great Awakening were stirring across the trans-Appalachian frontier; ministers of his generation often carried the gospel from settled eastern parishes into the newly opening territories of the Ohio Valley.

In keeping with the broad westward migration that drew so many Maryland and Virginia families across the mountains in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Henry's later years were spent in Indiana. He died in 1846 at Danville, in Hendricks County — a community in the still-young state, organized only in the 1820s and 1830s — having lived through the founding of the nation, the War of 1812, and the rapid settlement of the Old Northwest.

Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall was a 5× great-grandfather of the compiler along the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.