Patrick Colhoun of County Donegal, Ireland (Died 1740/1, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania): Immigrant Progenitor of the South Carolina Long Cane Calhoun Family

Close-up of Patrick Colhoun’s signature in John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1727), held by South Carolina Department of Archives and History

About Patrick Colhoun, the immigrant ancestor and father of Ezekiel Calhoun and his siblings Mary (Noble), James, William, and Patrick Calhoun, not a great deal is known with certainty. What researchers have thought they’ve known over the years has often turned out to be wrong, as such scant documentary evidence as we now have about Patrick has emerged. A case in point is the longstanding tradition that this immigrant ancestor was named James Calhoun and not Patrick. As Brian Anton explains in an excellent must-read article at his Genealogy of the Calhoun Family site, for quite some time there was confusion due to a persistent tradition, including among some members of the Calhoun family itself, that the given name of the immigrant ancestor was James – when the sparse documentation that has survived for this immigrant progenitor now shows he was named Patrick.[1]

Ezekiel Calhoun (abt. 1720, Co. Donegal, Ireland — bef. 25 May 1762, Augusta Co., Virginia), Son of Patrick Colhoun and Catherine Montgomery (Part 1)

4 May 1743 bond of Ezekiel and William Calhoun with John Noble and James Mitchell for administration of estate of Patrick Calhoun, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in probate records of Lancaster County copied by George T. Edson in 1936; a photocopy is in the John C. Calhoun papers at South Caroliniana library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

In this and a subsequent posting (a two-part series), I’ll be discussing Ezekiel Calhoun (abt. 1720 – 1762), son of Patrick Colhoun and Catherine Montgomery, the immigrant ancestors of this Calhoun family. Ezekiel was the father of Mary Calhoun Kerr, who was previously discussed. Ezekiel’s life history moves from County Donegal, Ireland, where he was born, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where his parents settled in 1733, to Augusta (later Wythe) County, Virginia, where the Calhoun family moved from Pennsylvania by October 1745, and finally to the Long Cane settlement of what became Abbeville County, South Carolina, where the family settled in February 1756 — though, as we’ll see, Ezekiel died back in Virginia on a trip he made there at the end of his life to check on his property in Augusta County.