The Caldwells visiting this website share a common language (English), ancestry (Anglo Bretonic), ancestral homeland (United Kingdom), and sentiment (“If you don’t know from where you came, you don’t know where you belong.”– Percy Bysshe Shelley).

Like the pathfinder Daniel Boone, Caldwells have embraced the frontier, be it as a midland farmer sheepherder fleeing William the Conqueror’s ethnic cleansing, a Scottishg coal miner’s son leaving behind a desert of despair, or an Ulster Irish Presbyterian seeking the Promised Land. The Cub Creek Caldwells were among the core English settler groups in the Middle Atlantic colonies of the 17th century. The Lancaster County Caldwells arrived in the first quarter of the 18th century. Caldwells were among the earliest white settlers of Canada and Australia. Even an Indian tribe calls themselves the Caldwell Nation.

Caldwells were among the small farmer Davids who vanquished the Imperial Goliath during the American Revolution.[Eric Kaufman, “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the “Universal” Nation, 1776-1850,” Journal of American Studies 33 (1999), 437-457.] The Caldwell clergy were called the Fighting Parsons. Telling their parishioners that they were the Chosen People, the Caldwell clergy inspired wary Scotch-Irish to repel British Oppression. Without the upper class economic dependence on British ties, the Scotch-Irish Caldwells supported the Whigs, not the Tories. The Whigs popularized the belief that their ancestors had known a Pre-conquest freedom that had its roots in the Anglo-Saxon German forests and Celtic tribes never conquered by Rome. The Whigs were receptive to the notion that Anglo-Celtics had escaped the Norman British yoke and brought the torch of freedom to America [Id.]. Accompanying a purified religion and purified liberty they prided themselves on a purified Caldwell genealogy with Protestant ideas predating the Reformation. [Id.]

Caldwells are among the vanguard of the nonconformity, as either Presbyterians, Quakers, Congregationalists, Huguenots, Baptists, or Refused to State. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Anglicanism have waned among the Caldwells. Fathers no longer tell their children of the atrocities committed during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 that ignited anti-Catholic sensibilities and drove home the difference between English-speaking Protestant American colonists and their non-white/Catholic/pagan and French/Indian speaking “other.” The Quebec Act of 1774 by which customs and the language of the French were retained in Quebec no longer triggers the fear expressed by Alexander Hamilton that “Papists” have corrupted the government, will make French the language of America, and place the Protestant in a disadvantageous position. (Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. I, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York & London: Columbia University Press, [1775] 1961), 170, 175.)

Caldwells were among the first to begin interdenominational education. Their Log College academies anglicized the lowland Scots and Scotch-Irish, such that their dialect is all but dead in America, refined the rough with Greek and Latin, and taught slaves how to read.

Surprises remain in store. By looking for traces in Y-chromosome of ancestry, scientists will be able to show whether an Ayrshire Caldwell with black hair has a Basque ancestor whose stone age paleolithic migration to Scotland predated the iron=age Celtic invasion of Scotland, or reveal evidence of ancestry in the steppes of Asia at the time of the Great Flood of 7000 B.C., in which melting glacial ice caused rising Mediterranean Sea to spill water into the Black Sea, flooding the settlements at the water’s edge, and dispersing the people into Europe. Mitochondrial DNA analysis can now link the mother’s ancestry to one of the 7 “Eves,” i.e., common maternal ancestral relative, going back as far as 25,000 years. Published studies have already shown that only about 25% of the people presently living in low land portion of Scotland and 10% in Wales have genetic markers evidencing Anglo-Saxon ancestry. A negligible number in the lowland counties of Scotland exhibit genetic evidence of Viking ancestry, but much higher percentages are found around York and Dublin.

The median height of a Scot today is 5'6.” Yet the majority of Caldwells range from 5'9" to 6'5." I suspect that this above average height was due to a diet high in calcium supplied by the diary cows of Ayrshire and Renfrewshire or elsewhere, a prevalent lactose tolerance, and the genetic blend of Anglo-Bretonic-Dumnonii genes.

When Scotland’s Lord High Chancellor William Caldwell was called upon to approve of changes in possession of property of the victims of the mid-14th century black plague who left no kin, perhaps he favored members of his clan, providing a ready explanation why so many Caldwells suddenly appeared as fee owners of land in Ayrshire and Renfrewshire in the mid 14th century. I have no evidence that this occurred, but I will keep an eye out for any evidence bearing on the merits of this conjecture.