John Watts Darnall

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Watts Darnall (1736–1798), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his colonial Maryland birth, marriage to Mary Ann McDonald (McDaniel), his son Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall, his death in frontier Kentucky, and the broader era context of westward migration from the Chesapeake into the trans-Appalachian frontier in the late eighteenth century.

John Watts Darnall, born in 1736 in St. James Parish, Charles County, in the Colony of Maryland, lived a life that spanned the entire arc of British colonial America's transformation into the early American Republic. His birth in a Chesapeake parish placed him within one of the oldest and most settled regions of the English colonies, where tobacco cultivation, established parishes, and tightly knit kin networks had defined social life for generations. Charles County in the 1730s was a landscape of tidewater plantations, modest farms, and parish churches, and it was within this familiar colonial order that John Watts Darnall came of age.

In the course of his adult life he married Mary Ann McDonald, whose surname appears in the records also as McDaniel — a common orthographic variation in the period, when spelling of Scots and Scots-Irish surnames was rarely fixed. From this union came at least one son recorded in the family archive: Henry Lewis Darnall, born in 1765, who would in time take orders and be remembered as the Reverend Henry Lewis Darnall, living until 1846.

By the close of his life, John Watts Darnall had removed westward from the settled Chesapeake to the new frontier of Kentucky, dying on the sixth of March, 1798, in Montgomery County. His passage from Maryland to Kentucky placed him among the great wave of post-Revolutionary migrants who crossed the Appalachian ranges in the 1780s and 1790s, drawn by the promise of land in the Bluegrass country. Montgomery County, formed in 1796 only two years before his death, was then a recently organized jurisdiction at the eastern edge of the Kentucky settlements, and his presence there marks the family's transit from tidewater colony to inland republic within a single lifetime.

John Watts Darnall was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler, standing on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line of descent.