Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland (1660–1745), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, emigration to colonial Maryland, marriage to Anne McPherson, his son Thomas William McDaniel, his death in Charles County, and era context regarding Scottish migration to the Chesapeake.

Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland (1660–1745) was born in Scotland and died on the 25th of May, 1745, in Charles, in the Colony of Maryland. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth-great-grandparent, and his life spans the long arc from the late Stuart era of his Scottish birth to the mature colonial society of the Chesapeake on the eve of the French and Indian War.

The surname he carried, preserved in the family records as MacDaniel-Scotland, marks plainly the country of his origin. Scotland in the years of his youth was a kingdom in turbulence: the Restoration was newly established, the Covenanting struggles were not yet ended, and the union with England that would reshape his homeland lay decades in the future. From this northern country he came, in time, across the Atlantic to the tobacco coasts of Maryland — a colony which by the late seventeenth century had become a frequent destination for Scots, whether as merchants, indentured servants, or settlers seeking land along the Potomac and its tributaries. Charles County, situated in the southern reaches of the colony, was by his later years a settled landscape of plantations and parishes.

He was united in marriage to Anne McPherson, herself bearing a name of unmistakable Highland descent — a pairing that suggests the close bonds maintained among Scottish families even after transplantation to the New World. Of their union there is recorded a son, Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767), who in time would carry the family forward into the next generation and through whom the line descends to the compiler.

Daniel lived to the considerable age of eighty-five years, a span granted to comparatively few men of his century. He died in the colony that had become his home, having seen Maryland transformed from a frontier proprietary settlement into a mature province of the British Crown. Daniel was the compiler's eighth-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.