Thomas Smallwood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Smallwood (1678–1724), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Charles County, Maryland, his parentage, his daughter, and the historical context of colonial tidewater Maryland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Thomas Smallwood (1678–1724) was born in Charles County, Maryland, in 1678, and lived the whole of his forty-six years within that same tidewater county, where he died on the fourth of May, 1724. He was the son of James Matthew Smallwood (1639–1714), and stood in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandfather — among the earliest American-born forebears traceable in that branch of the family.

The Charles County of Thomas's lifetime was a thoroughly colonial place, organized around the cultivation of tobacco along the inlets of the lower Potomac. Founded in 1658, the county had been settled by English planters drawn by the proprietary grants of the Calvert family, and by the late seventeenth century its economy and social order rested upon a network of riverside plantations, indentured servants, and an increasing reliance upon enslaved labor. The royal takeover of the Maryland government in 1689 and the establishment of the Anglican Church as the colony's official religion in 1692 reshaped the public life of Thomas's youth, while the founding of Annapolis as the new capital in 1695 marked the transition from the older Catholic-proprietary order into a more thoroughly English provincial society. It was in this setting — neither frontier nor metropolis, but a settled riverine countryside of courthouse villages and tobacco wharves — that Thomas came of age and raised his family.

A daughter is recorded: Elizabeth Godfrey Smallwood, born in 1695 and dying in 1734, through whom the Smallwood line continued forward into the compiler's ancestry. Thomas's death in 1724 placed him among the second American-born generation of the Smallwoods in Maryland, his father James Matthew having preceded him to the grave only a decade earlier, in 1714.

Thomas Smallwood was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.