Thomas Cawood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Cawood (1697–1766), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers birth and death in colonial Maryland, his mother Mary Martha Cox, his wife Ann Freshwater, and their son Stephen Thomas Cawood. Notable: colonial Maryland origins in Charles County, with descendants carrying the Cawood/Caywood surname into the next generation.

Thomas Cawood (1697–1766) was born in Charles County, Maryland, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, an era when the Maryland colony, founded under the Calvert proprietorship, was still maturing from a frontier tobacco settlement into an established Chesapeake society. Charles County, situated along the Potomac, was at that time a region of tidewater plantations, small landholders, and parish communities, and it was into this colonial Maryland world that Thomas was born.

He was the son of Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), whose own long life spanned the transition from the late Stuart colonial period into the mature provincial era under the Hanoverians. Family records preserve his maternal line, though further particulars of his paternity have not been transmitted in the archive.

Thomas married Ann Freshwater, and from their union the family records preserve a son, Stephen Thomas Cawood (1740–1802), whose surname appears in later generations under the variant spelling Caywood — a common occurrence in the eighteenth century, when orthography remained fluid and family names were frequently rendered phonetically in parish registers, land patents, and county court books. Through Stephen the Cawood line continued forward into the Revolutionary and early national periods.

Thomas Cawood died on 26 May 1766, in his sixty-ninth year, in Maryland — the records pointing either to Charles County, the place of his birth, or to Montgomery County, which during his lifetime still formed part of the older Frederick and Prince George's jurisdictions before its later organization. His death came on the eve of the great imperial crisis between the American colonies and the British Crown, a transformation he did not live to witness, though his descendants would.

Thomas was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an early colonial root of the family tree reaching back into seventeenth-century Maryland.