Thomas William McDaniel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in colonial Charles County, Maryland, his Scottish-descended parentage, his marriage to Rebecca Stewart, and his recorded daughter Mary Ann. Notable: situates the family within mid-18th-century tidewater Maryland and the broader McDaniel/MacDaniel migration from Scotland.

Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767) lived the whole of his recorded life within the boundaries of Charles County, Maryland, where he was born in 1725 and where he died on the tenth of February, 1767, at the age of forty-one or forty-two years. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a seventh great-grandparent, one of the earliest colonial-era forebears documented along that branch.

He was a son of Daniel MacDaniel of Scotland (1660–1745) and Anne McPherson (1701–1745), both of whom died in the same year that Thomas himself entered his twentieth. The Scottish surnames carried by his parents — MacDaniel and McPherson — point to the steady current of Scots and Scots-Irish settlement that flowed into the Chesapeake during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Charles County in this period was a tobacco country of broad plantations and small landholders alike, bordering the Potomac and tied by water to the wider Atlantic trade; it was also a region in which Catholic and Protestant settlers had lived in uneasy proximity since the founding of the Maryland colony.

Thomas married Rebecca Stewart, whose surname likewise reflects the Scottish heritage well-represented in the parish records of southern Maryland. From this union is recorded a daughter, Mary Ann McDonald — the spelling rendered variously as McDonald and McDaniel in the surviving documents — who was born in 1745 and who lived a long life, dying in 1824. Through her the McDaniel line carried forward into later generations of the family.

Thomas's death in 1767 placed the close of his life nearly a decade before the American Revolution, in a colonial Maryland still firmly bound to the British Crown. He did not live to see the upheavals that would transform the country in which his daughter would grow to old age. Thomas William McDaniel was the compiler's seventh great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal (PP) line.