Mary Daniel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Daniel (1688–1749), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in colonial Charles County, Maryland, her maternal parentage, her daughter Rebecca Stewart, and the broader context of early 18th-century tidewater Maryland. Notable: deep colonial Maryland roots predating American independence.

Mary Daniel (1688–1749) was born in Charles County, in what was then the British colonial Province of Maryland, and there she lived out her life of some sixty-one years, dying in the same county in which she had been born. Her mother is recorded as Sarah Hines Luckett Darnall Robey (1668–1738), a woman whose own succession of surnames bears witness to the marital patterns common to the early Chesapeake, where widowhood and remarriage frequently reshaped colonial households.

The Charles County into which Mary was born in 1688 was a tobacco country of scattered plantations and modest river landings along the Potomac, settled only a half-century earlier under the proprietorship of the Calverts. It was a region of mixed Catholic and Protestant settlement, of indentured servitude giving way to a more entrenched labor system, and of social life organized around the parish, the courthouse, and the river. Mary's lifetime spanned the reigns of William and Mary, Anne, George I, and the early years of George II — a period during which Maryland's colonial society matured from frontier outpost to established tidewater community.

Of Mary's marriage the present record preserves no name, but her daughter Rebecca Stewart, born in 1723 and living until 1795, carries forward the family line and indicates that Mary was wed to a man of the Stewart surname. Rebecca's long life, stretching past the Revolution and the founding of the new republic, links Mary's colonial generation to the early national era through a single mother-and-daughter span.

Mary died in 1749 in the same Charles County where she had been born, never having known her country other than as a British colony. Through her daughter Rebecca she stands as an eight-times great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, one of the deepest colonial roots recorded in the Hyten family archive.