John Thomas Cawood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Thomas Cawood (1693–1767), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, parentage in the Cawood and Cox families, marriage to Elizabeth Godfrey Smallwood, his son Stephen V, and his death in the colonial Virginia frontier. Notable: spans the colonial Chesapeake and Shenandoah Valley settlement eras.

John Thomas Cawood (1693–1767) was born in 1693 at Saint Mary's, Charles County, Maryland, into one of the older colonial families of the Chesapeake tidewater. He was the son of Stephen III Cawood (1669–1735) and Mary Martha Cox (1671–1748), placing him in the third generation of Cawoods to take root in the Maryland colony, a province established under the Calvert proprietorship as a refuge that drew both English Catholic and Protestant settlers to its tobacco-bearing rivers.

The Charles County of John Thomas's youth was a landscape of plantations laid out along creeks and the Potomac, where wealth was measured in hogsheads of tobacco and where households were sustained by a mixture of family labor, indentured servants, and, increasingly in this period, enslaved laborers. It was within this colonial society that John Thomas came of age, married, and began a household of his own.

He took as his wife Elizabeth Godfrey Smallwood, joining the Cawood line to the Smallwood family, another name long associated with the Maryland tidewater. From this union came at least one recorded son, Stephen V Cawood (1724–1810), who would carry the family name forward into the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the era of American independence.

John Thomas Cawood died on 23 April 1767 in Berkeley County, in what is today West Virginia. His passing in that locale reflects a broader pattern of the mid-eighteenth century, when families of the tidewater began moving west and inland into the Shenandoah Valley and the Virginia backcountry, drawn by available land along the foothills of the Blue Ridge. He thus ended his life on a frontier far removed from the riverine plantations of his birth, having lived through nearly the full span of the colonial eighteenth century, from the reign of William and Mary to the eve of the American Revolution.

John Thomas was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.