Mary Daniel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Daniel (1688–1749), an eighth-great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Charles County, Maryland, her descent from Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey, her daughter Rebecca Stewart, and the era context of colonial tidewater Maryland. Notable: lifelong residence in one colonial Maryland county across the early eighteenth century.

Mary Daniel (1688–1749) was born in Charles County, in the tidewater region of British Colonial Maryland, and died in that same county six decades later, her entire recorded life unfolding within its parish bounds. She stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth-great-grandmother, a distant but firmly seated link in the colonial-era foundation of the family.

Her mother was Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey (1668–1738), whose succession of surnames reflects the not-uncommon pattern of multiple marriages among colonial women, whose households were often reconstituted after the loss of a spouse. Through this maternal line, Mary belonged to the established planter society of southern Maryland, a region originally settled under the Calvert proprietorship and shaped by tobacco cultivation, Chesapeake river commerce, and a religiously mixed population in which Catholic and Protestant families lived in close, sometimes uneasy, proximity.

Charles County in Mary's lifetime was a settled but still rural colonial society. Born only three years after the founding generation of the county had passed its peak, Mary came of age during the reign of Queen Anne, the Act of Union of 1707, and the consolidation of royal authority over Maryland following the Glorious Revolution. By the time of her death in 1749, the colony was on the eve of the imperial wars that would culminate in the French and Indian conflict, and a generation removed from the American Revolution.

Mary became the mother of Rebecca Stewart (1723–1795), through whom the line descends to the compiler. Rebecca's surname indicates Mary's marriage into a Stewart family of the same colonial region, though the particulars of that union are not recorded in the present archive.

Mary Daniel was the compiler's eighth-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, anchoring the family's presence in colonial Maryland at the turn of the eighteenth century.