Ann Freshwater

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ann Freshwater (1695–1766), a seven-times great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Maryland, her parentage in the Freshwater and Hudson families, her marriage to Thomas Cawood, her son Stephen, and the era context of early eighteenth-century Charles County, Maryland.

Ann Freshwater (1695–1766) was born in Charles County, in the colonial province of Maryland, to Thomas II Freshwater (1672–1726) and his wife Elizabeth Hudson (1679–1751). She entered the world at the close of the seventeenth century, in a tidewater colony that had been founded only some six decades earlier as a proprietary grant to the Calvert family and that, by the time of her birth, was a tobacco-producing society of small planters, indentured servants, and enslaved laborers settled along the broad waterways of the Potomac and its tributaries. Charles County, where she was born, lay in the southern Maryland tobacco belt, and its parish life, courthouse business, and shipping landings would have framed her early years.

Ann married Thomas Cawood, joining her Freshwater line to the Cawood family — a surname long established in the same southern Maryland community. Of the children born of that union, the family register records Stephen Thomas Cawood, sometimes rendered Caywood (1740–1802), through whom the line descended to the compiler. The variation in the surname's spelling between Cawood and Caywood was characteristic of an age in which orthography remained unfixed and clerks and ministers recorded names as they heard them.

Ann lived through a long span of colonial history, from the reign of William III into the eve of the American Revolution. She would have witnessed, from her Maryland vantage, the consolidation of royal government in the colony, the steady expansion of the tobacco economy, and the early stirrings of the imperial conflicts that would eventually produce independence. She died in 1766 in Maryland, in her seventy-first year, having outlived both of her parents by more than a decade.

Ann Freshwater was the compiler's seven-times great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as one of the early colonial Maryland matriarchs of the family register.