Gaelic surnames are the names which were applied to Irish people hundreds of years or even millennia ago. Many of these are still preserved in Ireland and amongst the large Irish diaspora in North and South America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand today, albeit often in modernized and Anglicized forms. Gaelic surnames differ from Irish surnames in that they are generally derived entirely from the Irish language and variants thereof, whereas ‘Irish’ surnames are more reflective of Ireland’s history over the past nine centuries, being a tapestry of Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish surnames, generally Anglicized in some fashion.
History of Gaelic surnames
Gaelic surnames are in some sense alive and well today, though in another paradoxical sense not very common at all. This is a historical phenomenon. If we go back several millennia the origin myth of Ireland suggests that the Gaels (Irish) arrived to Ireland from Spain and other parts of continental Europe, something which is true enough given that Ireland, or Hibernia, to use the Roman name for the island, was settled by Celtic groups in the first millennium BCE. Hibernia was not conquered by the Romans and so the island retained its own indigenous language and naming practices.[1]
Over time in late antiquity and into the medieval era people began to use surnames in Ireland which denoted their line of descent and these then became well-established as the names of the several dozen lordships which ruled different parts of the country down to the sixteenth century. Hence we find groups like the Uí Néill and Ó Domhnaill in Ulster, the Mac Murchada (‘Mac’ being ‘son’) in Leinster and so on and so forth. There was a gender difference in this as well. Typically a male surname would use Ó, Uí or Mac to indicate a line of descent, but a female surname might begin Ní, transliterating as ‘daughter of’.[2]
These Gaelic surnames were dominant across much of Ireland until late medieval and early modern times and in some sense they are still with us today, but instead of Uí Néill one will typically find O’Neill, instead of Ó Domhnaill it became O’Donnell, and so forth. The causes of this lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the English had conquered and colonized large parts of Ireland around Dublin in the east and parts of the south from the late twelfth century onwards, this earlier conquest always remained incomplete. This changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as large scale conquest, colonization and transplantation occurred.[3] Over time English became the dominant language of government and society in Ireland and these Gaelic surnames were modernized and Anglicized to become the Irish surnames that are more common today.[4]
Gaelic naming comventions
The Gaelic surnames which emerged in ancient times were overwhelmingly patronymic in indicating descent from a revered ancestor. Hence Ó Néill or Uí Néill (modern, Anglicized O’Neill) was a Gaelic surname which indicated one was a descendant of Niall of the Cenél nEógain, a lord of Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, in the tenth century. The fact that there are variants on how to spell Ó Néill indicates another facet of Gaelic surnames, in that they were common before the vernacular languages of Europe were standardized in the early modern era. Hence one will find variant spellings of the same surname, particularly if you travel between the different provinces of Ireland where different versions of the Irish language were spoken in late medieval/early modern times.
Similar patronymic Gaelic surnames abounded across the island in medieval and early modern times. Additionally, Irish lords and prominent individuals often carried a cognomen that was more of a descriptor. Hence a famous lord of the sixteenth century was Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill, or Red Hugh O’Donnell. Ó Domhnaill was the surname of his clan in Tyrconnell (modern-day Donegal), while Aodh (the Gaelic version of Hugh) was his personal name. Ruadh, meaning ‘red’ in Gaelic, almost certainly indicated that he had red hair or facial hair. Similar Gaelic naming conventions proliferated across Ireland in pre-modern times.[5]
There is still evidence of the use of these names in Ireland and abroad today. For instance, while most Irish people today named O’Connor will spell their surname in this way, some Gaeilgeoirí (native-Irish speakers) will still spell their name in the traditional Gaelic manner. This can take the shape of an Anglicized spelling combined with Gaelic syntax to look like Ó Connor, or it can be a combination of both Gaelic spelling and syntax such as Ó Conchobhair.[6]
Geographic spread of Gaelic surnames
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Ireland experienced enormous emigration to countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Argentina, Brazil and Chile as the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and over-population led to mass migration. This has led to the emergence of an Irish diaspora which is estimated to be somewhere between 50 and 80 million people worldwide. As this has occurred Irish and Gaelic surnames have spread beyond just Ireland itself to these diaspora countries, especially to cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Buenos Aires and Sydney.[7]
While many people in these countries, and in Ireland itself, now have surnames that are derived from Gaelic surnames, most are not authentically Gaelic. For instance, one will find many O’Reillys in Ireland itself today and in places like London, Glasgow, New York and Melbourne, but it is altogether rarer to come across someone who uses the more authentically Gaelic Ó Raghallaigh.
Generally speaking, the largest concentration of people who use their Gaelic surnames are found in the west of Ireland today. These are in places known as Gaeltachts where Gaelic-speakers were still prevalent in the early twentieth century owing to British colonial policies having affected landholding here to a lesser extent than anywhere else in the country between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Ireland became independent of Britain in the early 1920s a conscious decision was made by the country’s earliest governments to preserve the Irish language to the maximum extent possible in these Gaeltachts and even today primary and secondary education is by-lingual in Gaeltacht regions like Connemara in Connacht, the Dingle Peninsula in south-western Ireland and the country of Donegal in the northwest. It is in these locations that a person will find the highest concentration of people using their Gaelic surname today.[8]
Most popular Gaelic surnames and their origins
Some very common Irish surnames today that are based on Gaelic surnames are as follows:
- O'Brien – An extremely common surname in southern Ireland and parts of the diaspora. The Ó Briain lords and their clans ruled much of northern Munster in pre-conquest times.
- O'Connor – The Gaelic version of this is Ó Conchobhair. The O’Connors were one of the most powerful Irish lordships over a period of several centuries, aspiring and claiming the high kingship of Ireland at times. There were latterly two different Ó Conchobhair lordships in Ireland, one in Connacht and one in the Irish midlands in Leinster, leading to an especially large number of O’Connors throughout the country.
- O'Neill – Prior to the conquest and colonization of Ulster in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ó Néill or Uí Néill were the most powerful kinship group in the north of Ireland and there were thousands of O’Neills there, something which is still reflected in the prevalence of the modernized O’Neill surname there today.
- Kelly – An Irish surname that has been particularly modernized and Anglicized by dropping the Ó altogether. The original Gaelic version of this surname would have been Ó Ceallaigh. The O’Kellys were a powerful enough political and landed power near Galway in the west of Ireland.[9]
Famous people with Gaelic surnames
The following are some well-known examples of people who historically carried Gaelic surnames:
- Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair – Rory O’Connor, to use the Anglicized version of his name, was a prominent lord of Connacht in the twelfth century who aspired to the high kingship of Ireland. Crucially, his efforts to claim the high kingship led another Irish lord to invite the English to intervene militarily in Ireland, beginning over eight centuries of British entanglement in the country.[10]
- Aodh Ó Néill – Hugh O’Neill was the most powerful lord of Gaelic Ulster at the end of the sixteenth century and led an enormous rebellion against encroaching English rule. In this he allied with Spain and nearly emerged victorious, though was ultimately defeated and died in exile in Rome.[11]
- Gráinne Ní Mháille – Gráinne (Grace) O’Malley, a scion of the O’Malleys of western Connacht. She infamously became known as the Pirate Queen of Ireland in the late sixteenth century as she captained a small fleet of ships off the Atlantic coast of Ireland.[12]
- Mícheál Ó Cléirigh – Michael O’Clery was one of the great Gaelic scholars of seventeenth-century Ireland, one of the four authors of the Annals of the Four Masters, a sprawling set of Gaelic annals which compiled together Irish records of over 2,000 years of the country’s history, being one of the most important annalistic histories ever produced globally.[13]
See also
Explore more about Gaelic Surnames
- Ireland Marriages, 1619-1898 record collection at MyHeritage
- Ireland, Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864 record collection at MyHeritage
- Index of Irish Wills, 1484-1858 record collection at MyHeritage
- Irish Genealogies & DNA: Back into the Mythological Past at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ The Arrival of the Celts in Ireland. Expedition Magazine - Penn Museum
- ↑ There is a surefire way for the English to correctly pronounce Irish names. Just ask us. The Guardian
- ↑ Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994).
- ↑ A dozen things you might not know about Irish names. The Irish Times
- ↑ O'Donnell, ‘Red’ Hugh (Ó Domhnaill, Aodh Ruadh). Dictionary of Irish Biography
- ↑ The Evolution of Irish Surnames – Where your Irish Surname fits. A letter from Ireland
- ↑ Patrick J. Blessing, ‘Irish’, in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), p. 528.
- ↑ The Gaeltacht. Údarás na Gaeltachta
- ↑ Edward MacLysaght, The Surnames of Ireland (Dublin, 1988).
- ↑ Ua Conchobair, Ruaidrí. Dictionary of Irish Biography
- ↑ O'Neill, Hugh. Dictionary of Irish Biography
- ↑ O'Malley, Gráinne (Grace) (‘Granuaile’). Dictionary of Irish Biography
- ↑ Ó Cléirigh, Mícheál (O'Clery, Michael). Dictionary of Irish Biography