Origin of the Name Culhane
family history was found in the allfamilycrests.com archives.
Over the centuries Surnames developed a wide number of variants. Different spellings of the same name can be traced back to an original root. Additionally when a bearer of a name emigrated it was not uncommon that their original name would be incorrectly transcribed in the record books at their new location. Surnames were also often altered over the years based on how they sounded phonetically and depending on the prevailing political conditions it may have been advantageous to change a name from one language to another.
Variants of the name Culhane
include Cahalan, Cahalane, Callan and Cohalan. These names are derived from the Gaelic O'Cathalain sept.
A sept or clan is a collective term describing a group of persons whose immediate ancestors bore a common surname and inhabited the same territory. Irish septs and clans that are related often belong to even larger groups, sometimes called tribes.
The ancestor of the sept was Cathalan, King of Farney, who was slain in the year 1028.The name is mentioned frequently in the Fiants, Monastic Extents, Hearth Money Rolls and the Petty Census of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another sept of the name was found in County Roscommon in early Mediaeval times but the name is rare there today. In early mediaeval records in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the name is rendered as 'de Callan' with a David de Callan being recorded as Mayor of Dublin in the year 1280. In modern times the name Culhane is mostly found in County Limerick.
The Culhane coat of arms came into existence centuries ago. The process of creating coats of arms (also often called family crests) began in the eleventh century although a form of Proto-Heraldry may have existed in some countries prior to this. The new art of Heraldry made it possible for families and even individual family members to have their very own coat of arms, including all Culhane descendants.