Thomas William McDaniel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Charles County, Maryland, his Scottish-descended parentage, his marriage to Rebecca Stewart, and his daughter Priscilla. Notable: colonial Maryland tobacco-country setting and a Scottish McDaniel/MacDaniel surname tradition.

Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767) lived the whole of his forty-two years within the bounds of Charles County, Maryland, where he was born and where, on the tenth day of February 1767, he died. He was a son of Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland (1660–1745) and Anne McPherson (1701–1745), a pairing whose surnames bespeak the Scottish migration into the Chesapeake colonies that had so shaped the early eighteenth century. Both of his parents passed in the same year, 1745, when Thomas was a young man of about twenty.

Charles County in Thomas's lifetime was a tobacco country, settled along the Potomac and Wicomico rivers and given over to the slow, demanding rhythms of plantation agriculture, parish life, and the quiet provincial governance of colonial Maryland under the Calverts. The county's population blended English Catholic founders with a growing presence of Scots and Scots-Irish families, of which the McDaniels were part. It was into this world, on the eve of the great mid-century imperial wars, that Thomas came of age, married, and raised his household.

He took as his wife Rebecca Stewart, a union that joined two families of Scottish surname. Of their issue, the family record preserves a daughter, Priscilla McDaniel, born in 1747 and living a long life until 1824. Through Priscilla the line carried forward into the next century and ultimately into the lineage from which the present compiler descends.

Thomas did not live to see the gathering of the colonial discontents that would, within a decade of his death, break into revolution; he died in February 1767, while Maryland was still a loyal province of the British crown. He rests, by the record, in the same Charles County earth in which he was born.

Thomas William McDaniel was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.