John* Richard Baird III

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Richard Baird III (1667–1755), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, parentage, transatlantic resettlement to colonial New Jersey, and known issue. Notable: Scots emigrant to Monmouth County in the colonial era; the surname carries an unverified Ancestry hint, here flagged with candor.

John Richard Baird III (1667–1755) was born on the 15th of October, 1667, at Gimberton in the Parish of Liberton, Midlothian, Scotland — a rural district lying just south of Edinburgh, then a region marked by the religious tensions of the late Covenanter period and the political turbulence preceding the Glorious Revolution. He was the son of John Baird (1640–1687) and Janet, also recorded as Jonet, McMath Bannatyne (1641–1676), and he came of age in a Scotland still recovering from years of ecclesiastical strife.

Like many Lowland Scots of his generation, John eventually crossed the Atlantic, and the record of his death places him at Taponemus, in Monmouth County, New Jersey, on the 6th of April, 1755, at the considerable age of eighty-seven. Monmouth County in that era was a settled colonial community of mixed Scots, English, and Dutch families, many of whom had been drawn to East Jersey through the proprietary land grants extended to Scottish settlers in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. The Scots proprietors of East Jersey had actively recruited families from Midlothian and the surrounding shires, and the presence of a Liberton-born settler in Taponemus is consistent with that broader migration pattern.

Among his children was Martha Bard Baird (1708–1782), through whom his line descends into the compiler's ancestry. The variation between the spellings "Bard" and "Baird" was common in the period, reflecting both Scots phonetic rendering and the inconsistencies of colonial recordkeeping.

A note of honest caution belongs in this entry: the surname as carried in the compiler's working records bears the mark of an unverified Ancestry hint, and the connection between this John Baird and the descending line, while plausible and consistent with the records, has not been independently confirmed.

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