You fellows have been busy since I turned my back!
Thanks for the debate.
Unfortunately history has to repeat itself. The great host - our "Poo-bah" John was going to set up a "best of the discussion group posts. So that posts that contained serious research material could be stored away from the general (but useful) chaff of the queries and repetitive comment.
It seems to me that the same subjects come up over and over again and are answered patiently by the more knowledgeable and dedicated researchers.
Consequently we see the Hugenot story brought up time and time again to be consistently flattened by the facts that are known.
The Caldwell's of Castle Caldwell comes up again and again and it appears to get a bit monotonous.
The presbyterian connection is mentioned.
The English Caldwell family gets almost no air-play even though they are probably just as numerous as the Scots/Irish family.
I wil try and be constructive:
I think that somewhere down the line one of the Caldwell family may have married into a Hugenot family and the wires were crossed - the Hugenots most probably came from the female side of the family somewhere. I cannot see anywhere in my research where the Caldwell male line had anything to do with Hugenots - other than by marrying one. If someone has any facts rather than the myth then we will all be happy to hear them. Bear in mind that the Hugenots were protestants and that if Caldwell's were Hugenots it must have been after the reformation.
I have a treasured copy of the "Caldwells of Castle Caldwell" by John B Cunningham. I purchased it from the author in the mid 1980's. He was (is?) the headmaster of Belleek School in County Fermanagh Northern Ireland. I have already quoted extensively from this work in this very discussion forum. I have posted John Cunningham's contact address and given my own theory about the "Pirates" and other adventures which I believe are references to the activities of a group of brothers from that family which happened in the 18th century (not in the antiquity of the myth). I took some trouble over this and it appears to have gone unread from the tenor of the comments that are still currently appearing in the discussion forum. Plunkett Caldwell mentions a number of Caldwell families in Northern Ireland and he is very correct. The Caldwell's were obviously fairly thick on the ground in South West Scotland and many chose the adventure of a new start in Northern Ireland when the opportunity arose. Consequently the Northern Ireland family is descended from a considerable number of Scots immigrants. The Caldwells "of Castle Caldwell" are a family who struck it lucky at the expense of the native Catholic Irish after one of the more serious rebellions. Cunningham notes in his book that there were other Caldwell's working for the Castle Caldwell crowd who were not related. The most celebrated was a fiddler who got drunk and fell from a barge on Lough Earne and drowned. His gravestone is in the form of a fiddle.
The Presbyterian connection is simple - the troubles in Scotland over the rule of Bishops led a lot of Scots to leave South-West Scotland for Northern Ireland and to practise their faith there. They were more likely to be the most devout (extreme?) of their faith which was a recipe for further conflict in Ireland. As all people in any persuasion like to live in peace further trouble combined with land pressure and famine led to large scale re-immigration in later centuries. In other words the Presbyterian faith is no more than a badge of their original Scottish-ness even though they had been Irish for two centuries or more. That very break means it is very hard to trace Irish ancestors back into Scotland. Most people struggle to trace their ancestors back more than 2 centuries even now with modern electronic aids (such as this forum). How much harder is it to trace back to Scotland when most immigrants could cross the Irish sea in less than a day in a small boat that could easily carry their meagre belongings? Bear in mind that they were surruptitiously slipping away from oppression - not doing a grand immigration thing. Also we must realise that reverse immigration back from Ireland to Scotland was very much on the cards. My own family in Scotland hits the brick wall round about 1750 or so and I am wondering if they had been in Ireland and had returned.
The English family does not get much air-play because I think they did not migrate as much. They were not under the same socio-economic pressures and just stayed put. Consequently they do not have so many descendents in foreign lands questioning their roots. They are very much there and I am currently trying to get one of the family to put his two bobs worth up on this site as well.
It is significant that my own relations in Scotland are very relaxed about their ancestors (which are also mine) and do not seem over concerned about their family history. The quest for our roots seems strongest in the descendents of families that have migrated. (sorry Plunkett - I didn't say "exclusively") By the way there are Plunkett's in Coffs Harbour.