John Calvert of Stanmills

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Calvert of Stanmills (1648–1699), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Ulster birth, his mother Jane Glasford Calvert, his daughter Mary, his transatlantic passage to Pennsylvania, and the broader context of late 17th-century Scots-Irish and Quaker-era migration from Ulster to William Penn's colony.

John Calvert of Stanmills was born on the sixth day of October, 1648, at Stranmillis, a settlement upon the southern outskirts of Belfast in the province of Ulster, Ireland. He was the son of Jane Glasford Calvert (1626–1685), and from her line drew the Scots-Irish blood that, in his generation, so often carried families across the Atlantic in search of land and liberty of conscience. The byname "of Stanmills" — a variant of Stranmillis, signifying the old strand-mills upon the River Lagan — fixed him to that particular townland and distinguished him among the many Calverts of the north of Ireland.

The Ulster of John's youth was a country in slow recovery from the upheavals of the 1640s, settled in great part by Lowland Scots and northern English, and in the latter half of the seventeenth century increasingly stirred by religious dissent. It was in this climate that many Ulstermen looked westward to the new proprietary colony of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by William Penn as a refuge for Friends and other peaceable sectaries. Whether by ship from Belfast or Londonderry, John Calvert in time made that long passage himself, for he closed his days far from the Lagan.

He was the father of Mary Price, born in 1687 and living until 1736, through whom his line descended into the colonial families of the Delaware Valley. The years of Mary's birth and rearing fell within the first generation of Penn's colony, when Philadelphia was yet a young town of brick and timber upon the Delaware.

John Calvert died at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of September, 1699, in the fifty-first year of his age, having lived to see the new world take root about him.

John was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.