Rebecca Stewart

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler in 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 Mary Ann, and the colonial Maryland era context in which her life unfolded.

Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795) lived the whole of her seventy-two years within the bounds of Charles County, Maryland, a tidewater county on the lower Potomac whose tobacco economy, Catholic and Anglican parishes, and tightly knit planter households defined the world into which she was born and in which she would eventually be laid to rest. She entered life in 1723 as the daughter of Mary Daniel (1688–1749), and the surname Stewart she bore placed her among the many families of Scottish and Scots-Irish extraction who had settled along the Chesapeake during the latter colonial decades.

The Maryland of Rebecca's childhood and early womanhood was still a proprietary colony under the Calvert family, its population spread thinly across plantations rather than gathered in towns, and its women charged with the management of households that were at once domestic, agricultural, and economic enterprises. It was within this setting that Rebecca married Thomas William McDaniel, joining her line to a family whose surname — variously rendered McDaniel and McDonald in the records of the period — likewise carried the marks of Highland or Ulster Scots origin.

Of the union of Rebecca and Thomas, the family record preserves the name of one daughter, Mary Ann McDonald (1745–1824), born when Rebecca was about twenty-two years of age. Mary Ann would live nearly four-score years and carry the lineage forward into the era of the early American republic, a republic her mother lived just long enough to see take its first uncertain steps.

Rebecca Stewart died on the 11th of July, 1795, in Charles County, Maryland, the same county that had cradled her in infancy. She had outlived the colonial order, witnessed the Revolution, and seen the establishment of the new federal government under Washington. Rebecca was the compiler's seventh-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.