Dr. Stephen C Cawood

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Dr. Stephen C Cawood (1630–1676), a 10× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his English birth, Yorkshire parentage, transatlantic emigration to colonial Maryland, marriage to Anne Terrett, his son and continuing line, and the 17th-century context of Stuart England and the early Maryland colony.

Dr. Stephen C Cawood, born the fourteenth of May, 1630, in Pontefract, in the County of York, North Yorkshire, England, was the son of Stephen William Cawood (1606–1653) and Eleanor Knight of Ackworth (1609–1675). He entered the world during the reign of King Charles I, in a Yorkshire still shaped by the medieval cloth trade and the looming tensions that would soon erupt in the English Civil Wars. Pontefract itself, dominated by its great castle, would within a dozen years of his birth become one of the most contested strongholds of those wars, and the Cawood family would have come of age amid the convulsions of Crown and Parliament.

At some point in his adult life, Stephen crossed the Atlantic to the Province of Maryland, the proprietary colony chartered to the Calvert family in 1632 as a refuge of religious toleration and a tobacco frontier. He settled in Charles County, on the lower western shore — a region of plantations, creeks, and emerging gentry along the Potomac. There he married Anne E Terrett, joining his line to the early colonial families of the Chesapeake.

To Stephen and Anne was born a son, Stephen Cawood III (1669–1735), through whom the line would descend in the New World and ultimately reach the compiler's own generation.

Dr. Cawood departed this life on the fifteenth of May, 1676, in Charles County, Maryland, having reached only his forty-sixth year and one day. His death came in a volatile year for the English colonies, the same season in which Bacon's Rebellion convulsed neighboring Virginia and unrest stirred along the tobacco coast. He left behind a young son and a widow, and a family name that would persist in Maryland for generations.

Dr. Stephen C Cawood was the compiler's ten-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.