Stephen Thomas Cawood \ Caywood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Stephen Thomas Cawood/Caywood (1740–1802), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, parentage, marriage to Priscilla McDaniel, his daughter Rebecca, and era context surrounding colonial and early-republic Maryland. Notable: lived through the American Revolution; spans the transition from colonial Charles County to the early federal period in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Stephen Thomas Cawood, recorded in some hands as Caywood, was born about 1740 in Charles County, Maryland, and died on the 23rd of February, 1802, in Montgomery County of the same state. The variant spelling of his surname — Cawood and Caywood appearing almost interchangeably in the records of his generation — was characteristic of an age in which orthography followed the ear of the clerk rather than any fixed family standard, and both forms persisted among his descendants.

He was the son of Thomas Cawood (1697–1766) and Ann Freshwater (1695–1766), both of whom departed this life in the same year, leaving Stephen to come into his own inheritance and station at roughly twenty-six years of age. The Cawood name had by that time been planted in tidewater Maryland for several generations, the family having taken root in the tobacco country of Charles County during the colonial proprietorship of the Calverts.

Stephen married Priscilla McDaniel, and of their union the family register preserves a daughter, Rebecca Caywood, born in 1775 and living until 1849. Rebecca's birth coincided almost exactly with the opening of the American Revolution, and Stephen's full adult years thus unfolded against the most consequential decades in the early life of the Republic — the war for independence, the framing of the Constitution, and the first administrations under Washington and Adams. Maryland in this period was a state of mixed plantations and small farms, its older Catholic gentry interleaved with Protestant settlers, and the gradual movement of population from the lower counties up into Montgomery and the Piedmont was already well underway. Stephen's removal to Montgomery County, where he died, fits squarely within that broader internal migration.

Stephen Thomas Cawood was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.