Charles Carroll was born on September 19, 1737, in Annapolis, Maryland, the only child of Charles Carroll of Annapolis and Elizabeth Brooke Carroll. His family was Catholic, extremely wealthy, and descended from an Irish immigrant who had accumulated vast Maryland lands. Because Catholics faced legal restrictions in the colony, the family’s wealth did not provide equal access to public office. At about ten Carroll was sent abroad for education. He studied at Jesuit institutions in France, including the College of St. Omer, and later pursued classical, philosophical, and legal studies in Paris. He then trained in law at the Middle Temple in London. His long European education made him fluent in French, grounded him in Catholic intellectual life, and exposed him directly to British constitutional culture. Carroll returned to Maryland in 1765 after roughly sixteen years abroad. His father supervised the family estates and expected him to preserve both Catholic faith and property. In 1768 he married Mary Darnall, joining another wealthy Catholic family. They raised children within a close religious and kinship network. Despite exclusion from voting and office, Carroll entered political debate through print. Using the name “First Citizen,” he argued against fees imposed by the proprietary government and developed a public reputation as a defender of colonial rights. His education allowed him to combine legal reasoning with accessible political argument. Before becoming the longest-lived signer of the Declaration, Carroll had been shaped by Catholic minority status, immense inheritance, prolonged Jesuit education, French language and culture, English legal training, marriage, and exclusion from ordinary political participation. The contrast between personal wealth and civic disability sharpened his understanding of religious liberty and representative rights, while his family’s slaveholding estates embodied the limits of those principles.