John Baird

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Baird (1640–1687), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, transatlantic passage to colonial Pennsylvania, marriage to Janet McMath Bannatyne, and son Richard. Notable: 17th-century Scots emigrant, born in Midlothian, died in the Pennsylvania frontier era of William Penn's colony.

John Baird, born on the 27th of March, 1640, in Gimberton Parish, Midlothian, Scotland, stood among the earliest forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandfather line to cross the Atlantic from the British Isles. His birthplace lay within the historic shire that ringed Edinburgh, a region long shaped by Lowland Scots culture, Presbyterian conviction, and the turbulent religious and political struggles of seventeenth-century Scotland — an age that saw the Covenanting movement, the upheavals of the Civil Wars, and, in later decades, the persecutions known to history as the Killing Time. It was within this climate that many Scots of Baird's generation came to consider emigration to the New World.

He was united in marriage to Janet, sometimes recorded as Jonet, McMath Bannatyne, a name reflective of the same Lowland Scots heritage from which her husband sprang. Of their union, the family records preserve a son, John Richard Baird III, born in 1667 and destined for a long life that extended into 1755, carrying the Baird line forward into the eighteenth century and the American colonies.

John Baird's death is recorded in January of 1687 in the settlement that would become Hamilton, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. At the time of his passing, this region of the Pennsylvania colony lay along the edge of European settlement; William Penn had only recently received his charter from King Charles II in 1681, and the territory was newly opened to the Scots, Scots-Irish, English Quakers, and German settlers who would, over the following century, populate its valleys. That a Scotsman of Baird's generation should have completed the long journey from Midlothian to the wooded interior of Pennsylvania bespeaks the broader migration of his countrymen seeking religious freedom and new land.

John Baird was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.