While early Scotch-Irish immigrants to New England were discouraged in their search for religious liberty, due to state churches in some of the colonies, still there were some who established homes there and organized their own Presbyterian churches. There were some similarities in doctrines of the Puritans from England and the Presbyterians from Ireland and by the time of the Revolution, the two groups were sometimes collaborating in Christian movements.

Willlam Huston was one of the New England settlers, coming from the same county from which came John Houston of South Carolina, County Tyrone, Ireland. It is uncertain as to whether he came with his parents as a lad, or later as a young man on his own, but we find him living in Voluntown, Connecticut, as early as 1735. In August of that year he was admitted to the Presbyterian Church at Voluntown.

It was ten years later, May 29, 1745, that he married into a prominent Scotch-Irish family. His wife, Agnes unman, was a descendant of James Hinman, who served at age 16 as a drummer boy in the army of William of Orange at the crucial Battle of Boyne in Ireland in which the forces of Catholic King James II were defeated.

From this line of Hustons, through William’s daughter, Elizabeth, descended Willson Lumpkin who served as Governor of Georgia, as well as Congressman and senator from that state. Elizabeth married, as her second husband, Samuel Hopkins who was a nephew of Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

William Huston was with the British army under General Braddock in his attempt to capture the French Fort Duquesne