Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland (1660–1745), an eighth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-paternal (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage to Anne McPherson, and the issue of his line. Notable: he stands as one of the earliest Scots progenitors in the Hyten lineage, anchoring the family's colonial-era roots.

Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland, born in the year 1660 in Scotland, stands among the earliest forebears traceable in the Hyten family register, his life spanning a remarkable eighty-five years across two continents and a turbulent century. He departed this life on the 25th of May, 1745, in Charles County in the Province of Maryland, having lived through the reigns of five English monarchs and the maturation of the American colonies from frontier outposts to settled provincial society.

The latter seventeenth century in Scotland was an age of considerable upheaval, marked by religious conflict, the Covenanter struggles, and the political union that would eventually bind Scotland to England in 1707. It was an era that sent many Scots across the Atlantic in search of land, livelihood, and liberty of conscience. Daniel was among those who made that crossing, and by the close of his life he had established himself in Charles County, Maryland — a tobacco-growing region along the Potomac that drew settlers of many origins, including a substantial Scottish and Scots-Irish element.

He was united in marriage to Anne McPherson, whose surname likewise bespeaks Highland Scottish origin, suggesting a household in which the cultural memory of the old country was preserved through kinship and naming. Of their issue, the family record preserves the name of their son, Thomas William McDaniel, born in 1725 and departing this life in 1767. Through Thomas the line would continue into the generations of the American Republic, the family name evolving in spelling from MacDaniel to McDaniel as was common among Scottish surnames in the colonies.

Daniel's longevity is itself worthy of remark, for to attain the age of eighty-five in the colonial period was an uncommon blessing. He represents, in the architecture of the Hyten genealogy, the foundational Scots ancestor of the paternal-grandfather line, and stands as the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal branch.