The McCulloh Name - Origin and Spelling
by Rodney McCulloh
The McCulloh name is an ancient one and is believed to be of Celtic origin. Surnames first came into use in Scotland and Ireland in the 10th to 12th centuries. The McCulloh name first appeared in documentation in Galloway, Scotland where the name Thomas Maculagh, "Counte de Wyggtone," was listed on the Ragman Roll of 1296. Most sources classify the McCulloh name as a patronymic (named after the father). The prefix Mac means "Son of." Thus McCulloh means the son or descendent of Culloh. A form of the name translated from Scots Gaelic means "son of the boar." An Irish form of the name is translated "son of the hound of Ulster." In America the Mac is most often reduced to Mc and sometimes to the simple M’.
Surnames can also be topographical in origin. In their book, The Descendants of Captain John McCollough (1770-1847) and Anna Elizabeth Spangler (1779-1858), Curtis and Mark McCollough relate that their father and grandfather, Theodore Olyn McCollough, "...believed our family name was of topographic origin." A literal interpretation of MacCulloch could be Mac (son of), cul (Gaelic for cool, a nook, or shaded area), and loch or lough ("lake" in Scotland or Ireland), or "son of the one who lives by the cool lake."
Although our branch of McCullohs immigrated from northern Ireland it is not actually known whether our ancestors, and our name, is Irish or Scottish in origin. The 50 most common surnames in the 1861 census of Scotland does not include the McCullough name while in modern times the name is among the 50 most common names in Ulster (Northern Ireland). Eighty percent of the McCulloughs in Ireland are found in the province of Ulster and a census of 1659 in the Ulster Counties of Antrim and Down shows the name to be a principal Irish name at that time.
One of the areas in Scotland having the highest concentration of McCulloughs was Galloway in the Southwest lowlands. The reasons are complex but in 1610 the "Plantation" of Ulster was announced by King James the VI of Scotland/I of England. This colonization program made land in Ulster available to lowland Scots and British subjects to induce them to migrate to Northern Ireland to push out and subdue the Irish. This migration had actually begun in 1606 by private Scottish entrepreneurs, and men from the Galloway area received the largest land grants; all the great houses of Galloway being represented. This suggests some or all of the McCulloughs in Northern Ireland were/are of Scottish origin.
The most ancient forms of our name are "MacCu’Uladh" and "Mac Con Uladh," anglicized as "Maccullagh," and rendered in Scots Gaelic as "Maccullaich." So when did our ancestors begin to spell our name as "McCulloh?" Various degrees of literacy of our ancestors combined with random, often phonetic, spellings in official documents has resulted in a wide range of spellings. Our direct ancestors first came from Northern Ireland to Newcastle County, Delaware and settled in Franklin County, Pennsylvania in the mid 1700's. A sampling of the Franklin County, PA and Newcastle County, DE censuses for the years 1790 through 1870 show the following spelling variations: McCullough, McCollough, McCullo, McCollum, McCulluch, McColough, McCulloch, McColloch and McCullan. Interestingly, no McCulloh spelling appears in the censuses. However, these variations are probably more the result of the various census takers' arbitrary choices in spellings than the actual spellings used by the families themselves. And yet it seems the families themselves did not have a firmly established spelling for their own name. Between the years 1748 and 1758, William Edgar McCulloh's Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Archibald's brother James kept a diary.
