The Colhouns of Donegal

The LagganThe Laggan is a fertile, low-lying area in Donegal County, Ireland, stretching from Lough Swilly south and east to the River Foyle near Strabane in County Tyrone.  It stretches from Letterkenny almost to Londonderry, and south to the Finn Valley.  Confiscated by the English, its Irish inhabitants evicted, the Laggan was awarded in 1611 to Scottish and English families for settlement as part of a widescale plan called The Plantation of Ulster.

The Laggan was divided into two precincts of 12,000 acres each; Portlough to the north, and Lifford to the south.  The appointed undertaker of Portlough was Ludovic Stewart, 2nd Duke of Lennox in Dumbarton, Scotland, and his task was to assign estates of 1,000 acres each to Scottish families who would settle there.  All the estates were given to Stewart and Cunningham families except one which was given to Alexander, Laird of Colquhoun and Luss.

The Colquhouns had recently suffered defeat at the hands of the MacGregors (at the probable instigation of Campbell, Earl of Argyll) in a battle at Glen Fruin, and were in no position to be sending men over to Donegal.  Alexander passed the grant to his son Adam, but the only Colquhoun to settle in Donegal was Adam's sister Nancy, who was married to John McAuselan.  The settlement, named Corkaugh, was in what is now Raymoghy Parish.  Adam's son Robert was sent to live with his Aunt Nancy in 1629, at the age of seven.  When Robert was twelve, his father in Scotland died, and the grant passed to him.  Robert married one of the McAuselan girls, his cousin Katherine, in 1641.  They had four sons and three daughters.  It is said that it was Robert who officially changed the family name to Colhoun.

In 1651, Robert's eldest son William inherited an estate in nearby Tyrone County, near NewtownStewart, at the tender age of eight years.  The inheritance was from Sir William Stewart, 1st Baronet of Ireland, apparently a relative.  In order to keep the inheritance, William had to live there, so Alexander and Jennett McCausland, relatives already living in Tyrone and possibly already caretakers of the estate manor, agreed to raise William.  He, in turn, married their daughter Catherine in 1661, and took over the manor, called Crosh House.

*  *  *

In the late 1960's, a retired Orval Calhoun, who lived in Ontario, Canada, began pursuing his genealogy.  He interviewed all of his relatives, and ended up traveling to Ireland to record church records and gravestone inscriptions.  He read extensively, learning of the aristocratic Colquhoun line going back to the 13th century.  Then he published his landmark book:  800 Years of Colquhoun, Colhoun, Calhoun, and Cahoon History.  It was a single volume that grew, over the next twenty years, into four huge volumes, filled with genealogies sent to him from all over the world.

The book is still privately available, and it is held at various libraries including the LDS Family History Library and the Odom Genealogical Library in Georgia.  It is the primary source of a great number of published genealogies, especially online, and has been a fantastic inspiration for many Calhouns looking to link their line to this great big tree.

Orval was not a professional genealogist, and he worked from a lot of secondary sources that he had no way of authenticating.  The book should be read primarily as a compilation and narrative rather than as hard-nosed research, though there is some of that.  Many people use the book as their only research, which is a mistake.  As Orval himself pointed out, the book should be a starting point for further research.

This narrative that I have written about the Donegal Colhouns is largely based on Orval's narrative about the Scottish Colquhouns who came to Ulster and then later emigrated to Canada, the United States, and Australia.  In other words, it is not based on any research I have done.  One should not imagine that all Colquhouns followed this route, nor that all Colquhouns are descended from any one person.  The existence of this book does not mean that you are somehow more related to Colquhouns than to all the other lines in your genealogy, including the lines you know nothing about.

I took the time to round up this information to see if my New Brunswick Calhouns were somewhere in this group.  Sadly, I have not been able to trace them.  Though the Donegal and Tyrone Colquhouns took the name Colhoun, there were other Colquhouns in Ulster who did not, and who were not directly involved in the Plantation.  Some were bureacratic, financial, and legal professionals who came to Londonderry and Belfast for work.  Some had migrated to Counties Antrim and Down at some point after the Plantation (I have found hints that my Calhouns might be from this group).  There were Colquhouns who moved freely between Ulster, England, and Scotland, depending on the conditions.  When any of these Colquhouns came to North America, some kept the name Colquhoun, some adopted Cahoon, and others used Calhoun.  Not all Calhouns descend from the Donegal and Tyrone Colhouns.

But let us continue the narrative.

*  *  *

The most celebrated Colhoun emigrant was James Patrick, son of The Reverend Alexander and grandson of William and Catherine in Tyrone.  He may have been the earliest of the many Colhouns who left Ulster for the American colonies, and his example set a pattern that was to be followed by many others in later years.  James Patrick left Ulster in 1733, arriving most likely in Philadelphia with his wife Catherine Montgomery and their children.

Matters were quite different in Ulster by 1733 than they had been a century earlier.  Though the original intent of the Plantation was to encourage numerous settlements held by relatively small landholders, by 1733 land ownership was dominated by a few English Anglican aristocrats who were absentee landlords.  A good example was James Hamilton, the Earl of Abercorn, who controlled something like 80,000 acres in Ulster, much of it in Tyrone and Donegal.  Some of these landlords were as hostile to the Scottish Presbyterians as they were to the Irish Catholics.

The Ulster Presbyterian Scots found themselves affected by laws that disenfranchised them politically and religiously.  They found it increasingly expensive to own or rent land, while finding the land less and less able to support them through droughts and crop failures.  Having aided the English in their effort to displace the Catholic Irish, the Scots found themselves in the same boat with the Irish, with no political or legal relief.  Rebellion was one possibility, emigration another.  An entire emigration industry was to develop and prosper, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Philadelphia was the largest city in the American colonies at the time, and Pennsylvania was actively recruiting immigrants looking for religious tolerance and land.  Ulster Scots settled in Pennsylvania, and later generations looking for inexpensive land headed down the Great Wagon Road to Virginia, then to the Carolinas, or to Tennessee and Kentucky.  Some headed west to Ohio and beyond.  The irony was that these frontier settlers were once again being used by the English to displace another people, the Native Americans, particularly the Cherokee, or to fend off an ancient enemy, the French.

Abbeville DistrictThus it was that James Patrick's family, after he had died in Pennsylvania in 1741, headed down the Shenandoah Valley to claim land grants in Augusta County, Virginia.  During the French and Indian War, the family moved again, to the Abbeville district of South Carolina.  This became their ultimate settlement, in spite of a Cherokee raid in 1760 that almost wiped out the family.  This was the family whose descendants were important South Carolina politicians, especially John Caldwell Calhoun, who became Vice President of the United States in 1825, and later Senator of South Carolina.

When New France was finally taken by the English in 1763, and Ontario opened up as a frontier, another emigration route became established.  Colhouns came to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec, then west to Ontario and beyond.  Orval Calhoun's ancestor George Colhoun took the route from Tyrone to Ontario in about 1860, settling in Reach Township near Toronto.  My Calhouns arrived in St John, New Brunswick, moved inland to claim land in Queens County in 1856, then migrated through Maine to Boston, Massachusetts in 1878.

BC

Related websites:
The Ulster Plantation
The Genealogy.com forum for Calhoun.
The Great Wagon Road on Wikipedia.
James Patrick Calhoun, with notes on the Long Canes Massacre.
Index to Orval Calhoun's Our Family History on the Clan Colquhoun Blog.
Fred and Sara Visit Ireland, sharing photos of Crosh House and Corkaugh.
Photos by Kenneth Allen of Crosh House and the Newtownstewart countryside.

The Origin of the Name Sheppeck

Uplyme, Devon I can't say that I know the origin of this unusual name, but it would be fun and perhaps instructive to try to make an educated guess.  All of my Sheppeck ancestors came from Dorset, England, and particularly the area around Bridport, so that is a place to start.

The name has many variations, mostly spelling differences involving the vowels, and the "ck" at the end is sometimes a "ch."  The oddest variation I've found is Shakeup, which was probably a mis-hearing of the name by an official.  But the variation that I think points to an origin is Shapwick, which in England would be pronounced something like Shappick.

Shapwick is a Saxon placename meaning sheep farm.  Sheep are certainly plentiful in all of Saxony, which is the southern and western part of England, so this is potentially a common placename.  I have only found two villages ever called Shapwick, however; the more well-known one in north-central Somerset, and another in eastern Dorset.  A family from Shapwick could have called itself "de Shapwick," and this could have devolved to Sheppeck.

Some evidence would come in handy, and indeed there are historical references to de Shapwicks from both of these villages.  But the name seems not to have stuck as a surname.  There is little evidence of any clan of Shapwicks or Sheppecks around either of these villages, or anywhere else in England with one exception.  There are plenty of Shapwicks, Sheppecks, etc. in western Dorset going back to the mid 1600's, in Allington, Bridport, Beaminster, and the surrounding towns.

Could this group have moved here from one of the Shapwick villages?  It's possible, but I don't think likely.  There are no direct routes connecting either Shapwick with this part of Dorset.  Could a nearby manor or estate have been called Shapwick?  I began digging deeper into old placenames, and sure enough, I found a Shapwick estate quite nearby, just over the line in Devon.

Long ago English counties were divided into administrative units called hundreds, and each hundred was divided into ten tithings.  Shapwick Devon was once a tithing of Axminster hundred, and a part of the manor of Axminster.  Now Shapwick is just a part of the parish of Uplyme.  It lies west and a bit south of Uplyme village, about 4 miles south of Axminster town and a couple of miles northwest of Lyme Regis, in Dorset.  The estate ranged from Shapwick Hill southward to the Lyme Regis - Exeter highway.  In his history of Devon, Hoskins says that Shapwick is mentioned as early as 1167.

Finding Shapwick on old maps is fun enough, but there's even a book!  It turns out that a Cistercian monastery in Axminster called Newenham Abbey ended up owning Shapwick.  The details are laid out in a book called The History of Newenham Abbey, written in 1843 by James Davidson, and this book is available and viewable online thanks to Google's book-digitizing project.

In 1245 the manor of Axminster was given to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire for the purpose of establishing a new abbey.  It was built about a mile southwest of Axminster town, above the Axe River, and named Newham.  Some of Shapwick was part of this gift, and within a few years the Abbey had acquired most of the remaining portions of Shapwick.

The last part, donated in 1333, was a part once held by a family named "de Shapwick."  It wasn't clear even then who this family was, so the Abbey asked for and received a brief pedigree, as follows:

Roger

Philip

Roger

William

John

Peter

Thomas

John

Peter

The last Shapwick to hold the land was John, in 1317.  His son, also John, became chaplain and prior of St John's Hospital in Bridport, Dorset, in 1357.  So there's the Bridport connection, and perhaps the ancestor of all us Sheppecks.

BC

Related websites:
Devon County History Page
The History of Newenham Abbey

Alvena McGraw

Josephine, Marg, and Vena McGraw, abt. 1913 All of us grandchildren knew Alvena as Nana, which I think was a corruption of her nickname, Vena.  I remember her as a jolly old lady (she was 60 years older than I) who loved family gatherings.  She was famously gullible, and easy to confuse.  She sometimes had funny ideas about what was happening around her.  I have always been intrigued with her face, a big Irish/English mug with unusually squinty eyes and a small, perfectly horizontal smile atop an imposing chin.  The eyes she got from her dad, James McGraw, and the mouth/chin combination from her mother, Selina Sheppeck.  Some of us have inherited her plump Irish nose with chagrin.

I have also been intrigued with stories about Nana's possible emotional or intellectual deficiencies.  I had no experience of this except for the increasing level of dementia that accompanied her aging (she lived to be not-quite ninety).  So I have had to rely on the descriptions and explanations of other relatives.

One frequently-told story is that Nana came from an isolated, rural setting to live in big, cosmopolitan Boston, and the change was too much of a shock.  The only problem is that Nana grew up in Ithaca NY, a small city to be sure, but a county seat with a significant population.  In addition, plenty of people successfully made the transition from country to city, so if Nana couldn't, why not?  Well, she was a little simple, or slow.  You mean, like mentally retarded?  Oh no, nothing like that, she just seemed not to have been exposed to much in her early life.  I'm sure, though, that Nana had the basic schooling that most of her contemporaries had.  And a person can have plenty of smarts not related to traditional school achievement.  My dad, Nana's son, was dyslexic, but that didn't prevent his educational and professional success.  So the question remains - what was up with Nana?  Well, she was a little unstable emotionally.  How so?  She could get confused and then hysterical, and not be able to function.

It was Nana's inability to function as a mother that seemed to be the main symptom of her ailment.  Her unhappiness, as many put it, seemed to begin with the move to Boston.  As she gave birth to more children (she had six altogether) she seemed less able to care for them, or keep a proper home.  My dad, who was her youngest, felt that he had really been raised by his father's sisters (especially his Aunt Mazie).  By the time my dad was six, his older sister Josephine had married and moved her family in, effectively taking over Nana's duties.

Hysteria was the name given to a disability that seemed to afflict mostly women.  Sigmund Freud's career was based on trying to solve the hysteria puzzle, and hysteria was continuing to be diagnosed as recently as the nineteen-thirties.  The cause was unknown, which stopped no one from guessing, and the treatments were often bizarre, humiliating, and sordid by today's standards.  The existence of hysteria helped reinforce the notion that women were weak, fragile, unstable, and unreliable.

Fortunately, hysteria is no longer a valid medical diagnosis.  Though just about every kind of mental illness has been labeled hysteria when manifest in a woman, the most common problem seems to have been an anxiety disorder.  Agoraphobia is a good example, but Generalized Anxiety Disorder may be the more common illness, and may be what afflicted Nana.

Nana's father, James McGrath, was born in a log cabin in Avon, New York, the son of William McGrath and Catherine Kelly.  He was their second child.  Catherine died young, in childbirth, when James was nine, and William moved the family to a house in Avon town.  James met and married Selina Sheppeck when he was about 23, and he and his family continued living with William.  Alvena was their second child, born in 1894.  When Vena was about four, James got a new job in Ithaca and moved the whole family, including his father.  Selina had her sixth child in 1905, the same year that William died.  Vena was eleven.

When Vena was about eighteen, her parents separated, and her father moved away to Rochester, some eighty miles distant.  I imagine he continued supporting the family, though I can't imagine he saw them often.  James and Selina never divorced, but never reconciled.  It was 1918 when Vena met and married James Calhoun - she was twenty-four.  She and James stayed with the family in Ithaca.  Two years later Vena gave birth to Josephine, her first child.  And six months later Vena's mother, Selina, died unexpectedly, of a stroke.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder is thought to run in families.  It is often triggered by a stressful event in young adulthood, and from there it is chronic, and can get worse.  It creates a state of excessive worry, not about anything in particular, but every little thing in general.  If the anxiety is severe or prolonged enough it can lead to depression - an inability to function at all.  It is similar to ordinary worry (my dad was well-known as a worrywart), but is more like a continuous, subdued panic attack.  It is very tricky to diagnose correctly, even by professionals.

After Selina's death, Vena and James moved to Massachusetts, and lived and worked on a chicken farm in Reading, a dozen miles north of Boston.  I've not heard many stories from this period in their lives, but I have heard that they were very happy.  James and Vena lived in Reading until after the birth of their third child, Mary, in 1925.  They moved to South Boston, where the rest of James' family lived.  And this is when, at age 31, the "unhappiness" for Vena began, and grew worse.

But I will always remember the happy Nana, forty years later, who loved the kids, and laughed when she was teased, who lived in the mysterious triple-decker with the smell of varnish, and who was just a little nutty, in a most delightful way.

BC

The Sheppecks and the McGraws

The Sheppecks can be traced back in Dorset, England, to the 17th century.  William Sheppeck's marriage to Sophia Rawles was recorded in 1803 in Bothenhampton, and his children appeared in the 1841 English census in Bridport.  His grandson Jonas was born in Bridport in 1837.

Bridport is north a ways from the coast, but the city was dominated by the seafaring industries of the time.  People became sailors and captains, rope-makers and sail-makers.  The seafaring was not just local - the route from southwest England to Newfoundland and other American points was well established, and frequently used for fishing and trade.

So it was not unusual for the Sheppecks to have connections to Newfoundland.  Sheppecks had married in Newfoundland, and some had come back and settled in Dorset.  I do not know if Jonas was passenger or crew when he went to Newfoundland and married.  He married Mary Parody or Parady in about 1860, and lived in the Fortune Bay area long enough to see his first son born.  The name Parady (possibly a variation on the French Paradis) was common in the fishing villages on the east side of the bay.  By 1864 Jonas and his family had returned to England, but not Dorset.  Jonas settled in St Helier, on the Isle of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands.  At some point he became a ship's captain, or master mariner.

Disaster struck the family when, in 1891, Mary died of an illness, and Jonas was lost at sea the following February.  By the 1891 census, Jonas' daughter Selina still lived at home with her younger siblings Elvena and Reginald.  Her older sister Mary Ann and her husband had gone to America two years earlier, and had found work in upstate New York, so in October of 1891 Selina set sail for New York.  She moved to Avon NY, outside of Rochester, and worked as a housemaid with her sister in the home of Herbert Wadsworth.  (Six months later, Elvena and Reginald emigrated to Boston.)

The Wadsworths were a venerable and important family in the Genesee Valley, and they owned extensive estates.  They regularly hired immigrants, mostly Irish, to work on the land and in their homes.  That is how William McGrath (pronounced McGraw and later spelled that way), working for Herbert Wadsworth, came to meet Catherine Kelly in the early 1860's.  Both of them had been born in Nenagh, in upper Tipperary County, Ireland, but they met in upstate New York.  Even their children worked for Herbert Wadsworth.  Their only son, James, worked as a houseboy, and he married Selina Sheppeck very shortly after she arrived at the Wadsworth house.

In about 1897, James got a new job in Ithaca (thanks to his brother-in-law Alfred Smith, the husband of Mary Ann Sheppeck) and moved there with his wife and three children, including his oldest daughter, my grandmother Alvena McGraw.  The McGraws became a large clan in Ithaca.  When James Calhoun, in Boston, enlisted in the Army for WWI, he was sent to Cornell University for training.  He met Alvena at a USO dance, and brought her to Boston in 1918 to marry.  They settled back in Ithaca, where daughter Josephine was born, and then moved to Boston permanently.

BC

Related websites:
Dorset OPC - Bridport
Newfoundland Genealogy
Jersey Genealogy
Livingston County NY Genealogy

Mary Starr

Mary J Starr was the wife of James Ryan, and the grandmother of James Leo Calhoun (the first).  She was most likely born in Pennsylvania, in about 1827, and seems to have died between 1890 and 1900.  She married James Ryan in Pennsylvania around 1844, and by 1850 she and James were living in Providence PA, which was soon to become part of Scranton.  By 1870, Mary and her children were living in Boston.  She was a widow, James having died just after the Civil War.  In 1890, Mary apparently moved back to Pennsylvania.

There are a couple of interesting family myths about Mary and James.  James is said to have been not Irish, but Spanish, and to have changed his name to Ryan to be able to get work.  Mary is said to have been German (Pennsylvania Dutch) and/or Quaker.

Any record I have found of James indicates that he was born in Ireland, but of course he may have been providing false information.  Certain kinds of labor were certainly made available to Irish immigrants, though usually it was undesirable work.  Still, it is not far-fetched to think that James could have changed his name, and there would be no way to know.  His supposed name, D'Orion (or something like that), seems more Italian than Spanish, and there were Italian immigrants in Pennsylvania at the time.  I have more to say on this below.

It is unlikely, though possible, that Mary was both Quaker and German.  Her name is no clue; there were both English Quaker and German Starrs.  One hint is contained in her daughter's death certificate.  The name is printed as Stair, which could be a misspelling, but is probably how it was pronounced.  That would mean that she was German:  the German Starrs pronounced it Stair, and sometimes spelled it that way, and also Stehr and Stohr.  The original German would have been Stoehr or Stöhr.

The Pennsylvania Dutch were German Protestants from the Rhine region of Germany, bordering France, an area called the Palatinate.  In the 17th century and beyond they were persecuted by Catholics, overwhelmed by French invaders, and decimated by famine.  Families fled to Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.  In 1709 the English Queen Anne offered refuge for German Protestants, not knowing that thousands would come to England.  The English placed many of the families in the American colonies, and Pennsylvania, with its religious freedom, was particularly welcoming.  For decades Germans poured into Pennsylvania, and settled in the farmland in the south of the colony.  Among these immigrants were Stöhrs who had moved from the Rhineland to Alsace, and then to the New World.

When Mary and James settled near Scranton before 1850, it was a small town just beginning to grow.  It had been called Slocum Hollow, and was home to a single iron manufactory and a handful of buildings.  In 1840, the Scranton brothers from New Jersey decided to take a gamble, and they bought the town, with its iron deposits.  They completely rebuilt the iron mill, and began using coal instead of charcoal to smelt the iron.  It became a hugely successful venture, and the word went out that workers were needed.  It's quite possible that agents were sent to the port of Philadelphia to round up willing Irish immigrants and bring them to Scranton.  James worked in such an iron mill; he was a puddler, which is someone who scoops the impurities off the surface of molten iron.

So how did a German farm girl meet an Irish immigrant and wind up in the middle of nowhere?  As the Pennsylvania Dutch population grew, it also spread.  Some of the "Dutch" moved north until they hit the Susquehanna River.  By the early 1800's, Stairs were living in towns just downstream of Wilkes-Barre.  One village was named Stairville, in fact.  At the same time, Irish immigrants had been slowly moving northwest of Philadelphia and beyond, and some Irish families had also settled near Wilkes-Barre.  The success of the Scrantons would have been big news in the nearby city of Wilkes-Barre, and labor would have been sought initially from the local populace.  A newly-married couple might have sensed their opportunity.

The couple may have needed some breathing room, too, for theirs was a mixed marriage:  Irish Catholic and German Protestant.  Unless, and this brings me to an interesting theory of my own, James Ryan did in fact change his name, not from the Spanish but from the German.  There were plenty of German names that began with the name of the river in the old homeland, the Rhine.  Some of the names had already been reduced to just Rhine or even Rine.  How big of a stretch is it from Rine to Ryan?

James apparently volunteered for service in the Civil War.  I have not found his records, but Mary is recorded as the widow of a veteran.  Family lore says that James died in Boston after the war, but he may have died in Pennsylvania, and Mary may have moved the family to Boston after that, perhaps to be near one of her married children.  It was her daughter Mary Cecilia who married Joseph Calhoun in 1875.

BC

Related websites:
History of the Palatinate
Pennsylvania Dutch history
Stoehr history
Scranton history

John and Joseph Calhoun

Joseph Charles Calhoun is my great-grandfather, and the father of James Leo (the first).  Joseph was born in St John, New Brunswick, Canada in January of 1848.  His parents were John Calhoun and Catherine Dooley, both born in Ireland.  This is all according to Joseph's death certificate from 1903.

Unfortunately this is the only solid information I have about John Calhoun.  There was a huge fire in St John in 1877, and almost all vital records up to that date were burned.  There is other information that is useful, but only if I make certain assumptions, which, of course, could be wrong.  There's a lot more research that could be done in New Brunswick.

A John Calhoon received a grant of land from the Province of New Brunswick in 1856.  He received 100 acres in Petersville Parish, Queens County, which was 40 miles north and inland from St John.  Ten years later, an 84 acre tract was transferred to Joseph Colhoun from John.  Both John and Joseph were listed in the Hutchinson Directories of 1865 and 1867 as living in Clones Settlement, a part of Summer Hill in Queens County.  John is listed in the McAlpine's Directory of 1870.

The entire family shows up in the dominion census of 1871 for Petersville Parish.  The family name is listed as Calchoon.*  There's John, a farmer and a widow, 75 years old, and Joseph, apparently his son, 22 years old, and Catherine, apparently a daughter, 26.  All are listed as being born in Ireland, and are listed as Catholic.  So what can we assume here?  Joseph is the right age to be our Joseph, his father is named John, and he has a sister named Catherine who could have been named for her mother.  The family is Irish, and as far as I can tell, our family has always been Catholic.  Joseph (and probably Catherine) would have been born in New Brunswick, not Ireland, but census takers often made assumptions of their own.  I think the odds are good that this is our family.  I have found no more records or listings of this family after this date, which agrees with the fact that Joseph had left New Brunswick not long after 1871 (He was married in Portland, Maine, in 1875).

What else can we assume?  According to the census, Petersville Parish was full of farmers from Ireland who were Protestant.  This would indicate immigrants from Northern Ireland, probably Scots-Irish, and I have read that many of these farmers had come from Tyrone County.  There is only one place in Ireland where people with the name Calhoun or Colhoun are from:  the border region between Tyrone and Donegal Counties.  This makes sense, since large estates owned by Colhouns were located there.

Let's assume John's daughter Catherine was born in New Brunswick.  That would mean that John arrived in New Brunswick sometime before 1844, which would be right in the middle of the potato famine.  Was John already married to Catherine when he arrived in St John?  I think not - Dooleys came from a few places in Ireland, but northern Ireland was not one of them.  It is quite likely that John was originally Protestant, like all his neighbors in Petersville Parish.  Catherine was probably Catholic, and maybe John converted as part of the marriage arrangement.  This was more likely to have happened in St John.  And John was 53 years older than Joseph, so I'm willing to bet that Catherine was also much younger than John.  An unconventional, perhaps "convenience" marriage would have been more likely in the highly unstable environment of 1840's St John.  Sick and poor immigrants were pouring in to St John from Ireland, and the city was not prepared to handle the influx.  Irish immigrants were kept in refugee/quarantine camps, or confined to city ghettos, where disease and hunger were rampant.  Conventions are easily abandoned in exchange for survival.

I have found no further records about Joseph's sister Catherine.  Joseph went on to marry Mary Ryan in Portland, where they had their first child, Mary (Aunt Mazie) in 1878.  By 1880, Joseph and his family were in South Boston, living near Mary Ryan's relatives.  He worked as a machinist, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 55.

BC

*This gives a clue to pronunciation.  The "ch" would have been hard, like the "ch" in "loch."  The Irish in Ireland often spelled it similarly.  Compare with the Scottish "Cahoon."  Even in this case the "h" would have had a hint of the "ch" sound.  By the way, the "a" would be pronounced like "ah" or even like an "o," hence the official Ulster spelling, "Colhoun."

Related websites:
The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick
History of the Petersville Parish region (which is now a military base)
The 1877 Fire at St John
The Irish in St John

The Origin of the Name Calhoun

The Lennox The ancient land of the Britons, the Kingdom of Strathclyde, was based in what is now Dumbartonshire in west-central Scotland.  If you locate the city of Glascow on a map, look a bit to the north and west and you will find Loch Lomond.  Flowing south from the loch is a river called the Leven, which joins the river Clyde at the city of Dumbarton.  At this junction, a tall pillar of rock juts straight up out of the river; the castle on top is Dumbarton Castle, and castle and city mark the center of the old kingdom.

To the east of and parallel to the Leven valley lies a stretch of land named Colquhoun (pronounced ca-HOON).  It lies between the valley and Dumbarton Moor, and stretches from the Clyde north to the Dumbarton Hills.  It is wooded, famously so, and its Gaelic name apparently means exactly that: a wooded stretch of land.*  The land itself is not particularly valuable, but the location is strategically important for Dumbarton.  At its southern end rises another rock out of the river, called Dunglass, with another castle atop, a smaller version of Dumbarton's.

As the kingdom became absorbed into a greater Scotland, the region became known as the Lennox (after the Gaelic name of the river, Levenach), and was controlled by an important family which took the name Lennox.  This family, eventually as Earls to the King, had the power to assign estates to families, with the King's approval.  An estate like Colquhoun would not have been assigned to the most important families, but to someone loyal and not likely to challenge the Earl or the King.  In the year 1241, Malcolm, Earl of Lennox granted the land to Humphrey of Kilpatrick (Kilpatrick was the name of the parish encompassing the Colquhoun estate).

Little is known about Humphrey.  He was of Norman descent, and probably attached to the court of Lennox by the King with instructions to absorb him into the family.  It is not clear who his forbears were, and he apparently had no family with him.  It is not clear if he is the same as a Humphrey of Kirkpatrick, a contemporary who lived further south.  He did prove to be loyal, he did marry into the family, he was not politically ambitious, and he turned out to be very successful at managing the land.  He moved into Dunglass Castle and took the name Colquhoun for his own.

The success of his family was evident when, about five generations later, Robert of Colquhoun married the daughter and heiress of Luss.  Luss was a magnificent, culturally significant estate on the western shore of Loch Lomond, and had been held by an important branch of the Lennox family for a very long time.  Robert moved the family seat to Luss, and became Laird of Colquhoun and Luss.  Over the generations the estate grew and eventually became a Barony.

In the early 1600's, Adam Colquhoun received an estate from his Stuart in-laws which was located in northern Ireland.  It was one of many estates confiscated from the Ulster Irish by the English and awarded to prominent English and Scottish families under the condition that they live there and bring their own tenants.  When the family moved to Ireland, they officially changed their name to Colhoun.  Colhouns came to own other estates in County Tyrone and County Donegal.  Over time, and especially in the nineteenth century, many Colhouns came to North America, both Canada and the US, and the name would change to Calhoun.

Who uses the name Colquhoun, or its variants, Cahoon, Calhoun, Colchun?  Obviously, anyone descended from the aristocratic lines I have described here.  But others adopted the name as well.  In this country, some slaves held by Calhouns adopted the name.  Peasants and tenants in both Ireland and Scotland whose Lords were named Colhoun or Colquhoun also would adopt the name.  And anyone living in a place called Colquhoun could refer to himself as So-and-so of Colquhoun, as did Humphrey of Kilpatrick all those centuries ago.

BC

* The word "colquhoun" is sufficiently distorted from the original Gaelic that no one really knows its meaning.  There are many attempted translations, some quite colorful and fanciful, but this one seemed the most straightforward.

Related websites:
History of Clan Colquhoun
History of Drumchapel (and Dumbartonshire)
Dunglass Castle
Early Map and Account of the Lennox

My Irish Moment

There was a time when friends of mine were hosting musical events in their home.  These home concerts were small, cozy events with food, drink, and traditional Irish music.  This family occupies a central position in the local Irish music community, a community that my wife and I are only peripherally connected to.

I have played traditional Irish music, and I understand and appreciate it, but I've never been crazy about it.  I have plenty of Irish ancestors, but that connection has not compelled me, as it has others, to identify with the music.  In fact, my surname is technically Scottish in origin (Colquhoun).  Add to that the Scottish ancestry on my mother's side, and my family has good cause to identify more with its Scottish roots.

A half-dozen years ago I began compiling and researching my family's genealogy.  The issue of ethnicity became clouded at once:  among my ancestors were Scots-Irish, Irish-Scots, Anglo-Scots, French-Canadian-Anglos, and Scots-Irish-Canadians.  It also became clear that my Calhoun forbears probably came from northern Ireland.  The connection to Scotland (if there was any at all) would have been back in the 17th century.  It made me a bit nervous to announce to my family that we were a lot more Irish than Scottish.  We knew nothing of Ireland, but we had all learned ancient Colquhoun history, we had clothing made from the tartan, some of us had visited Scotland, and one of my brothers had learned the whole kilt-bagpipe thing (he's really good at it, too!)

It was shortly after my father had died that my wife and I began attending the home concerts.  One of the concerts featured a fiddler living in New York but who had been born in Ireland.  During his performance, he told us that he had grown up in the western part of Tyrone County, near Donegal, in northern Ireland.  He mentioned the town, noting that probably none of us had ever heard of it, but I had:  it was the town near where my Calhoun ancestor had probably emigrated from, a fact that I had just recently unearthed.

So I was thinking about my dad, and about my Irishness, while the music played.  One of the tunes was by the famous Irish composer O'Carolan, who was a contemporary of Bach's.  My father loved Bach's music; he probably would have loved this traditional music, but he knew nothing about it.  For my dad, Irish music meant "Danny Boy."  And I could have introduced him to this music many years ago, but the thought never occurred to me.  We were Scottish, after all.

My father grew up Catholic in South Boston, which is about as Irish as you can get.  Our family had been there since the 1870's.  But no one had ever questioned the family's assertion that it was Scottish.  Apparently this concept, based on a technicality, provided solace and identity for a family struggling, like all the others, in an impoverished ghetto.  Certainly my father was eager to escape, and distance himself from his history.

I spoke with the fiddler after the concert.  He was excited that I knew about his home town, and he said I was lucky to know, even if only roughly, where in Ireland my ancestor had come from.  A lot of Irish-Americans have no idea.  Yes, I thought, I am lucky, and lucky to have realized, before it was too late, that this beautiful music actually applies to me.

BC