Mary Ann McDonald (McDaniel)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Ann McDonald (McDaniel) (1745–1824), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, parentage, marriage to John Watts Darnall, her son Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall, and her death in eastern Kentucky. Notable: her life spanned colonial Maryland, the American Revolution, and the westward migration into the Kentucky frontier.

Mary Ann McDonald, also recorded under the surname McDaniel, was born in 1745 in Charles County, Maryland, and departed this life on the 17th of May, 1824, in Fleming, Letcher County, Kentucky. Her seventy-nine years thus encompassed three of the most consequential epochs in the early American story: the late colonial period of her youth, the long struggle of the Revolution in her middle years, and the great westward migration of her later life.

Mary Ann was the daughter of Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767) and Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795), a household rooted in tidewater Maryland during a period when the colony's Catholic and Scots-Irish currents both ran strong, and when the tobacco economy still shaped the rhythms of family life along the Potomac and its tributaries. The McDaniel and Stewart surnames carried with them the imprint of Scottish and Scots-Irish origin so common to the Chesapeake gentry and yeomanry of that age.

She joined herself in marriage to John Watts Darnall, and of that union came at least one recorded son, Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall (1765–1846), who would in time take up the ministry. The Darnall name was an old and honored one in colonial Maryland, and Mary Ann's marriage thus united two lineages of long standing in the province.

In the decades following the Revolution, the trans-Appalachian country was opened to settlement, and families such as the Darnalls were drawn through the Cumberland Gap into the new state of Kentucky. Mary Ann's final years were spent in the rugged eastern Kentucky country of Letcher County, a region of narrow valleys and forested ridges where the pioneer generation laid the foundations of a new society. There she died in 1824 and was laid to rest, far from the Maryland of her birth.

Mary Ann McDonald was the compiler's 6× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.