Anne McPherson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anne McPherson (1701–1745), a maternal figure on the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line and an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler. This entry covers her Scottish birth, parentage, marriage, son, and emigration to colonial Maryland. Notable: Scottish-born ancestress who crossed the Atlantic and died in colonial Maryland, representative of the early 18th-century Scots migration to the American colonies.

Anne McPherson (1701–1745) was born on the thirtieth of August, 1701, in Scotland, to Alexander Doak McPherson (1679–1761) and Elizabeth Johnson (1679–1722). She belonged to a generation of Lowland and Highland Scots whose lives were marked by the political and religious upheavals following the Act of Union in 1707, and by the steady current of emigration that carried Scottish families westward across the Atlantic in search of land and stability. Anne was but a child when these forces began to reshape Scottish society, and they would in time draw her own household across the sea.

Anne was united in marriage to Daniel MacDaniel-Scotland, a union which carried the family from its native Scottish soil into the British colonies of North America. From this marriage came at least one recorded son, Thomas William McDaniel (1725–1767), through whom the line descended into the compiler's paternal-grandfather branch. The slight Anglicization of the family surname, from McPherson and MacDaniel into the simpler McDaniel borne by her son, mirrored the broader pattern by which Scottish names softened and shifted in their passage through colonial registers and parish books.

Anne's death came in 1745 in the colony of Maryland, at the age of forty-four. Maryland in that decade was a prospering tobacco province under proprietary rule, populated by a mingling of English, Scottish, Irish, and African inhabitants, and bordered by the Chesapeake whose tidewater plantations and inland farms drew settlers ever further from the older seaboard towns. That Anne ended her days upon Maryland soil rather than in Scotland confirms that the family's transatlantic crossing had been made within her lifetime, placing her among the earliest American-dwelling ancestors of this line.

Anne McPherson was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.