Priscilla McDaniel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Priscilla McDaniel (1747–1824), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, parentage in the McDaniel-Stewart household, marriage to Stephen Thomas Cawood, her daughter Rebecca, the family's westward migration to Kentucky, and Revolutionary-era context. Notable: she lived through the founding of the American republic and resettlement on the Kentucky frontier.

Priscilla McDaniel (1747–1824) was born about the year 1747 in Charles County, Maryland, a tidewater county along the Potomac whose tobacco economy and Catholic-tinged colonial society had taken root more than a century before her birth. She was the daughter of Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767) and Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795), and she came of age in the years leading up to the American Revolution — a period during which the Chesapeake colonies were drawn ever more deeply into the political ferment that would soon reshape the continent.

Priscilla married Stephen Thomas Cawood, whose surname appears in the records variously as Cawood and Caywood. From their union came at least one recorded daughter, Rebecca Caywood (1775–1849), through whom the line descended to the compiler. Rebecca's birth in the midst of the Revolutionary War situates the young family squarely within that turbulent decade, when colonial households across Maryland and Virginia were caught between loyalist sympathies, patriot militias, and the disruptions of a wartime economy.

At some point in the decades that followed, Priscilla removed westward to Kentucky, joining the great migration of Maryland and Virginia families who crossed the Appalachians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to take up lands in the newly opened bluegrass country. She died on the 17th of May, 1824, in Fleming County, Kentucky — a county in the northeastern part of the state, organized in 1798 and settled largely by such trans-Allegheny migrants. She was then in her seventy-seventh year, having lived through the colonial era, the Revolution, the framing of the Constitution, and the early decades of the American republic.

The loss of her father Thomas in 1767, when Priscilla was about twenty, and the long widowhood of her mother Rebecca, who survived until 1795, frame the generational shape of her early life. Priscilla was the compiler's 6× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.