A name is a name and you have adopted it, so I suppose that if you call yourself a Caldwell then you must be part of our tribe.

For some time I have been puzzled by the great number of Caldwell's in the United States and to a lesser extent in Ireland. The name comes from Scotland and England but although the English source of Caldwell may have come from many places the Scottish source is a much smaller area the name seems relatively more common in Scotland. I have rambled elsewhere on this site about my own personal opinions on the source of the Scottish name so will not eleborate further here.

In Ireland some native Irish families anglicised their Irish surnames and the ones that seem to have adopted "Caldwell" are Horish and Houriskey in Tyrone, and Mac Conluain (Cullivan, Colavin) in Cavan.

Perhaps if your Caldwell ancestors came from Cavan or Tyrone then your name may originally have been something else and you are not descended from a Scottish or English Caldwell at all (at all

This might explain the seemingly large number of "Scots-Irish" Caldwells emigrating to North America. The numbers seem out of proportion to the original Scots Caldwell population.

Perhaps the Scots Caldwells emigrated en-masse to Ireland (thereby depopuating the native land of Caldwells) and made a similar later en-masse emigration to North America.

Only guessing (and I know here are still a lot of Caldwells in Scotland - I am only commenting on the relativity brought about by noticability). The English Caldwell family also exists in significant numbers but we never seem to hear much from them.

In the end only DNA testing is going to classify the broad sweep of where we originated.

There is another problem: It is my firm belief that the Irish, especially those of Ulster, and the Scots, especially of the South-West are ethnically of the same racial intermix. Consequently I might predict that the DNA will tell us that all Irish and Scots Caldwells will be close in racial origin even though some may have been anciently called "Horish" or "Colavin" and others "Caldwell".

Find out a little more on my site: http://www.caldwell.harphampix.com/

Sort of debunks the everyone from the "Cold-well" theory.