Stephen III Cawood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Stephen III Cawood (1669–1735), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Maryland, his parentage, marriage to Mary Martha Cox, his son and continuing line, and the broader context of late seventeenth-century Charles County, Maryland.

Stephen III Cawood was born in December of 1669 at Hull, in Charles County, in the Province of Maryland, and departed this life on the fifteenth day of October, 1735, in the same county where he had passed the whole of his earthly course. He was the son of Dr. Stephen C. Cawood (1630–1676), a forebear of the medical calling, and of Anne E. Terrett (1633–1695). Stephen was scarcely seven years of age at the time of his father's death, and was raised through the remainder of his childhood under the care of his widowed mother, who herself survived until 1695.

Charles County in the latter decades of the seventeenth century was a tidewater society of tobacco plantations, modest river landings, and scattered parishes lying along the Potomac and its tributaries. It was a chiefly English and Catholic-leaning region within Lord Baltimore's proprietary colony, where land was measured in hogsheads of leaf and where the principal communities were knit together by river travel rather than by roads. It was within this landscape that Stephen passed his entire life of nearly sixty-six years, an unusually long tenure for a man of his generation.

He took to wife Mary Martha Cox, with whom he established his household. Of their union the family records preserve the name of one son, John Thomas Cawood, born in 1693 and living until 1767, through whom the Cawood line was carried forward into the eighteenth century and ultimately into the lineage of the present compiler.

Stephen lived through the transition of Maryland from proprietary to royal governance and back again, and through the early consolidation of the Chesapeake plantation economy. He died in the autumn of 1735, having reached an age that bore witness to the steady rooting of his family in the Maryland soil. Stephen III Cawood stood as a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.