: On his tombstone, and in his last will, the father of
: famed North Carolina pastor, Rev. David Caldwell,
: 1725-1824, called himself Andrew Caldwell. Yet for
: much of his life he spelled his name Calwell and
: Calwall, Scottish variants of Caldwell, that began to
: disappear in the eighteenth century, as Scotland
: increasingly assimilated English pronunication and
: spellings. Calwell appears on the 1741 deed to his
: farm in Drumore Township, Pennsylvania. Calwall is the
: surname listed on the baptism record of his son,
: Andrew, born 1735 in Glasgow. When his son Alexander
: succeeded as head of the household, a 1759 assessor's
: survey listed him as Alexander Calwell. Andrew
: Caldwell's tombstone states that he died at age 45 in
: 1757. By implication, he was born in 1712. There are
: no known records of his birth in Scotland, although a
: 1842 biography of Rev. Caldwell states that his father
: migrated from Scotland. Based on a speculation that he
: named his first son, David, after his own father, I
: checked the LDS records for a David Calwell or Calwall
: born in the 1790s, and there is only one, David
: Calwell, b. 1793, Lochwinnock, a few miles east of
: Beith, Ayrshire, and about five miles west of the
: hamlet of present day Caldwell and Caldwell Parish, in
: present day East Renfrewshire. The surname Calwell can
: be traced in the LDS records back to when Scotland
: first began systematically recording baptisms, shortly
: after the Reformation, in the sixteenth century. Rev.
: David Caldwell's father has often been confused with
: another Andrew (Andrus) Caldwell, b. 1793, who
: migrated from North Ireland about 1716 and died in
: 1752, also a resident of Drumore Township. The latter
: Andrus Caldwell married Ann Stewart, while Rev.
: Caldwell's father married Martha, whose maiden name
: still eludes us. Proof was provided by comparing the
: last wills of each Andrew Caldwell, as was done in a
: published biography by Ethel S. Arnett of the Rev.
: David Caldwell. Lochwinnock lies adjacent to the
: former Mure of Caldwell Estate, acquired when a Sir
: Gilcrest Mure married the remaining heiress to the
: Caldwell Estate. There is a possibility that the
: surname Caldwell, or variant spelling thereof,
: originated in Scotland as early as the twelfth
: century, because the Scottish King Malcolm (Canmore)
: in the twelfth century mandated that all inhabitants
: of Scotland take a surname based on their landed
: possessions. King David I, who owned estates both in
: England and Scotland, granted lands to many Englishmen
: during his reign and perhaps he transferred lands to a
: Caldwell. I understand that the royal charters no
: longer exist that might affirm this. The Domesday Book
: of 1086 was a survey only of England, not Scotland; it
: includes reference to numerous Caldwell manors and
: settlements predating the Norman invasion, coinciding
: with the former Kingdom of Mercia.
David
the spelling may be associated with the fact that country people in Scotland pronounce Caldwell as Ker-wahl as closely as I can render it. My grandfather was known as Tam Ker-wahl. My Uncle Tom told me that it was "just a nickname" and said that our family had "always" spelled it Caldwell and pronounced it the way it is spelled. I have also seen it spelled Carwall and Caldwells or Caldwalls (and you will know of other variants that we tend to get from time to time.
Tom