John Smallwood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Smallwood (1610–1667), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage to Mary Ann Whittington, son James Matthew Smallwood, and 17th-century context. Notable: early colonial Maryland settler from Cheshire, England; among the founding generation of the Chesapeake Catholic proprietary colony.

John Smallwood (1610–1667) stands among the earliest transatlantic forebears recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, an 11× great-grandparent whose life bridged the old market towns of Cheshire and the tobacco country of the Chesapeake. He was born in 1610 at Middlewich, Cheshire, an ancient salt-producing parish in the northwest of England whose Tudor-era economy turned upon the brine pits worked there since Roman times. The early seventeenth century into which he was born was a season of religious unrest, growing emigration, and the first stirrings of English colonial expansion across the Atlantic.

At some point in his adult years John departed England for the newly chartered Province of Maryland, founded in 1632 under the proprietorship of the Calvert family as a refuge in which English Catholics and Protestants alike might settle. He took up residence in Charles County, on the lower Potomac, a region whose plantations were then being carved out of forest and marsh and whose economy rested almost entirely upon the cultivation of tobacco. The Charles County of his lifetime was a frontier of small landholders, indentured laborers, and parish chapels scattered across great distances.

John married Mary Ann Whittington, and of their union the family register preserves the name of one son, James Matthew Smallwood, born in 1639 and living until 1714. Through this son the Smallwood line was carried forward into the colonial generations from which the compiler's ancestry would in time descend.

John Smallwood died on the 9th of August, 1667, in Charles County, Maryland, having lived to the age of fifty-seven — a respectable span in a colony where fevers, agues, and the hardships of plantation life often cut lives shorter. He rests among the founding generation of English settlers in the Maryland tidewater. John was the compiler's 11× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.