Rebecca Stewart

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Charles County, Maryland, her mother Mary Daniel, her marriage to Thomas William McDaniel, her daughter Priscilla, and colonial Maryland era context.

Rebecca Stewart was born in 1723 in Charles County, Maryland, and died there on the eleventh day of July, 1795, having lived the full span of her seventy-two years within the bounds of that single tidewater county. Her life thus traced the long arc from the late proprietary period of the Maryland colony, through the upheavals of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, and into the early years of the new republic.

She was the daughter of Mary Daniel (1688–1749), and though the record of her paternity is not preserved in the family papers, her mother's surname suggests the dense web of Anglo-Celtic settlement that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern Maryland. Charles County in Rebecca's day was a landscape of tobacco plantations, tidal creeks, and modest parish communities, settled in considerable measure by English and Scots-Irish families whose households worked the rolling lands above the Potomac.

Rebecca was joined in marriage to Thomas William McDaniel, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Priscilla McDaniel, born in 1747 and living until 1824. Through Priscilla, the line of Rebecca's descent carried forward into the generations that would eventually leave the Maryland tidewater for the inland frontiers of the early republic. The surname McDaniel, into which Rebecca married, was itself common among the Scots-Irish and Highland Scots families who had taken root in the Chesapeake colonies, and her daughter's life would unfold against the same colonial Maryland landscape in which Rebecca herself was reared.

Rebecca outlived her mother by nearly half a century and saw the colony of her birth transformed into one of the United States. She died in the summer of 1795, in the same county that had cradled her infancy, and was laid to rest among the generations of her kin in Charles County, Maryland.

Rebecca was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.