back to Family Stories, Fall 2021
by Patrick Calhoun
The most interesting part of my family story was all of the shocking discoveries that I made in the process of uncovering my whole story. One of these specific stories that I discovered was how my last name changed so much throughout the generations eventually getting to myself.
As I tracked my paternal line back into the 1500s, I got all the way back to Scotland in this era, where many of my ancestors had the last name “Colquhoun.” I was shocked to learn that this was how my last name used to be spelled, but an Ancestry hint with a link to some documentation made it very clear that this was how my last name used to spelled and these are definitely my ancestors.
The figure shown here is what came up on Ancestry, and this allowed me to uncover this revelation. My family in the 1500s in Scotland went by the name of Colquhoun, and I uncovered this with my ancestor Robert Colquhoun (1622-1666). The document that I included in this post explains that Robert Colquhoun was the ancestor with which my ancestors migrated from Scotland to Ireland. Robert must have been older in his life to move the family to Ireland, so I assumed that this move took place around the 1640s.
I wondered if there was some historical context to this move to Ireland with my ancestors, and sure enough, I uncovered some very interesting historical information that shed light on potentially why my ancestors moved and how my last name changed from there. The English Civil War triggered fighting all around Scotland roughly around the same time that my ancestors would have moved out of Scotland and moved to Ireland.[1] Oral tradition has been passed down through my family as to what happened with my last name when my ancestors moved to Ireland, and that is that they changed our last name to “Colhoun” upon arriving in Ireland to try and hide the Scottish roots of the last name. Why exactly they did this is unclear to me and all of my family members who have heard this same story.
Potentially, there may have been bad blood with my ancestors and other powerful families at the time, so maybe they needed to change the last name to keep the line from being detected. From there to now, I am unsure how my last name would have come to be spelled the way it is today, but I am particularly interested to try and figure out how my last name is the way it is today.