Anne McPherson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anne McPherson (1701–1745), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Scottish birth, parentage, transatlantic relocation to colonial Maryland, marriage, motherhood, and early death. Notable: she belonged to the early-eighteenth-century Scottish emigration to the Chesapeake colonies and bridges the family's Scottish McPherson ancestry to its American McDaniel descendants.

Anne McPherson was born on the 30th of August, 1701, in Scotland, into the household of Alexander Doak McPherson (1679–1761) and his wife Elizabeth Johnson (1679–1722). Her early years were spent in a Scotland still adjusting to the union of its crown and parliament with England, a period during which economic pressures, religious tensions, and the lure of overseas opportunity drew increasing numbers of Lowland and Highland families toward the American colonies. The Chesapeake region, and Maryland in particular, was at that time receiving steady streams of Scottish settlers, drawn by tobacco lands and the relative tolerance of the proprietary colony.

Anne was joined in marriage to Daniel MacDaniel, himself of Scottish origin, and the union represented one of the many transatlantic Scottish households then taking root along the Maryland tidewater. Their son, Thomas William McDaniel, was born in 1725 and would live until 1767, carrying forward the line that ultimately descended to the compiler. The slight orthographic shift from McPherson and MacDaniel to the anglicized McDaniel form found in succeeding generations was a common feature among Scottish immigrant families of the colonial period, as parish clerks and county recorders rendered Gaelic and Scots surnames into the spellings most familiar to their English-trained ears.

Anne lost her mother Elizabeth in 1722, when Anne herself was but twenty years of age, while her father Alexander would outlive her by sixteen years, dying in 1761. Anne's own life closed in 1745 in Maryland, when she was approximately forty-four years of age — not an uncommon span for women of the colonial era, whose lives were frequently shortened by the rigors of frontier childbearing, fevers endemic to the Chesapeake lowlands, and the general hardships of early American settlement.

Anne McPherson stands in the compiler's pedigree as an 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and through her son Thomas William the McDaniel surname enters the family record.