Alexander Doak McPHERSON

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Alexander Doak McPherson (1679–1761), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, transatlantic settlement in colonial Maryland, marriage to Elizabeth Johnson, and his daughter Anne. Notable: Scottish-born ancestor whose life spanned the late Stuart era through the early reign of George III, settling in colonial Charles County, Maryland.

Alexander Doak McPherson (1679–1761) stands among the earliest Scottish-born forebears entered in the family register, occupying a place in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a ninth great-grandparent. He was born on the 5th of July, 1679, in Dalradia, Argyllshire, on the western coast of Scotland — a region long associated with the McPherson and allied Highland kindreds, and one whose people had been deeply affected by the religious and political contentions of the later Stuart period. The year of his birth fell within the troubled reign of Charles II, and his early youth would have coincided with the upheavals of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the consolidation of Presbyterian church order in Scotland thereafter.

At some point in his lifetime Alexander crossed the Atlantic and established himself in the Province of Maryland, a colony then under proprietary government and notable, even among the English colonies, for the comparative latitude it permitted in matters of conscience. Charles County, where he was to end his days, lay along the lower Potomac and was by the early eighteenth century a settled tobacco country of tidewater plantations, modest landholdings, and parish churches.

Alexander was united in marriage with Elizabeth Johnson. Of this union the register preserves the name of one daughter, Anne McPherson (1701–1745), through whose line the family's descent to the compiler is carried. Anne's birth in 1701 suggests that the couple's household was established before the close of the seventeenth century, whether in Scotland or in the colonies the record does not declare.

Alexander Doak McPherson lived to the considerable age of eighty-one, dying on the 7th of June, 1761, in Charles County, Maryland. His lifetime thus bridged the reigns of five British sovereigns, from Charles II to George III, and witnessed the maturing of the Chesapeake colonies in the generations before the American Revolution. He was the compiler's ninth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.