A Letter from Ireland
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A Letter from Ireland Mike Collins lives just outside Cork City, Ireland. He travels around the island of Ireland with his wife, Carina, taking pictures and listening to stories about families, names and places. He and Carina blog about these stories and their travels at: www.YourIrishHeritage.com A Letter from Ireland Irish Surnames, Counties, Culture and Travel Mike Collins Your Irish Heritage First published 2014 by Your Irish Heritage Email: [email protected] Website: www.youririshheritage.com © Mike Collins 2014 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. All quotations have been reproduced with original spelling and punctuation. All errors are the author’s own. ISBN: 978-1499534313 PICTURE CREDITS All Photographs and Illustrative materials are the authors own. DESIGN Cover design by Ian Armstrong, Onevision Media Your Irish Heritage Old Abbey Waterfall, Cork, Ireland DEDICATION This book is dedicated to Carina, Evan and Rosaleen— my own Irish Heritage—and the thousands of readers of Your Irish Heritage who make the journey so wonderfully worthwhile. Contents Preface ...................................................................................... 1 Introduction ............................................................................ 4 Section 1: Your Irish Surname ........................................ 7 Nine Surnames from Your Irish Heritage........................... 8 Losing your O's and Macs—and getting them back........15 The Melting Pot of Ireland..................................................19 Born on the Fourth of July .................................................26 The Royal Families of Ireland .............................................31 Our Top 10 Irish Surnames ................................................35 Why are there so many English names in Ireland? ..........39 The McCartneys of the Mull of Kintyre ............................43 The Norman Surnames of Ireland .....................................47 Section 2: The Counties of Ireland .............................. 53 A Roadtrip through 17 Irish Counties-Part 1 ...................54 A Roadtrip through 17 Irish Counties-Part 2 ...................61 A Roadtrip through 17 Irish Counties-Part 3 ...................67 A Roadtrip through 17 Irish Counties-Part 4 ...................73 A Roadtrip through 17 Irish Counties-Part 5 ...................78 The County Cork Red Herring ...........................................83 The Two Graces of County Mayo .....................................91 A Letter from Ireland Section 3: Famine and Emigration .............................. 97 Dear Old Skibbereen............................................................98 Your Thoughts for the President of Ireland .................. 100 A Letter to the People of Ireland .................................... 111 One Man and 35 Surnames .............................................. 115 Section 4: Culture, Customs, Music and Craic .......... 119 Running an Irish Castle for a Day ................................... 120 The Tribes of Ireland ........................................................ 126 A Country of Family and Kin .......................................... 131 Christmas Time in Ireland ................................................ 135 The Irish Anti-Heroes of American Movies .................. 138 An Irish Name for Your Baby ......................................... 140 Five Sisters—One Baby .................................................... 144 What Does it Mean to be Irish?....................................... 148 Druids, Bards and Brehons .............................................. 154 Looking into Saint Patrick's Mirror ................................. 159 A Tale of Two Easters ...................................................... 163 Conclusion .......................................................................... 167 Appendix—The Surnames of Your Irish Heritage ....... 169 Further Reading and Resources ....................................... 193 Acknowledgements ........................................................... 195 Preface Just after Christmas I received an email from Mary, in which she talked about how her father had recently passed away. He was a third generation Irish American and they had established a little ritual over the last few weeks of his life. Each Sunday, she visited and read that week’s “Letter from Ireland” to him. Together, they would chat and reminisce about their uncles, aunts and cousins all over the world. They recalled the two visits they shared to Ireland—the people they had met and the sights and sounds they enjoyed. Mary and her father already had a close and loving relationship. However, she felt that these Sunday morning chats helped them to connect at an even deeper level—both to each other and to a shared Irish heritage and ancestry that would always be there. I must admit, when I read that letter I had to drop what I was doing and walk outside in the air for a while. Now, when people ask me why I write the “Letter from Ireland” each week, I think of Mary and her Dad—among so many other stories that I have received— and I just smile! About one year ago, in March of 2013, I started to post pictures of our (my wife Carina and myself) travels around 1 A Letter from Ireland Ireland on my Facebook page. This, in turn, led to lots of comments and questions. By May of that year we had established the “Letter from Ireland”. Each week on a Sunday morning, I sit down and write a letter from our house in Cork in Ireland. At first, this letter went out to a few dozen people. At this point in time, it is going out to thousands of people of Irish descent all over the world. In the Letter, we chat about the Irish weather, surnames, counties, history and culture. And each week I have to put aside Monday and Tuesday to answer all the letters that come back from our readers. In this book you will find a collection of the letters from Ireland written each Sunday morning over the last year. You may notice that I try to keep an informal and chatty style. I decided to keep this style throughout the book as it seems to work best for all our readers—and I do hope that works for you too. In Ireland we have the oral tradition of the “seanfhocal”, or wise saying. One example is: "Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd". This can be translated as “we live in the shelter of each other”. I think that is a lovely way to underline the interdependence and connection between all people around the world of shared Irish heritage. So let me finish up by saying to you my friend, from here in the heart of Ireland— be you in Canada, Argentina, the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Australia or the many other countries our readers 2 Preface come from—"Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd". We too, live in the shelter of each other. Mike Collins, May, 2014, Cork, Ireland. You can sign up for our “Letter from Ireland” at: www.youririshheritage.com/letterfromireland 3 Introduction Have you ever wondered where the surnames in your Irish family tree come from? Maybe you know already. Maybe you have a collection of birth certificates, census and other records that provide you with some bookends from the lives of your Irish ancestors. However, you and I know that there is a lot more to being Irish than being represented by a collection of demographic data. How did your Irish relatives live? What was life like for them? What gave them their values—their drive and sense of fair play? This is the area we aim to tease out in this book. When I look back over the fifty “Letters from Ireland” we sent out to our readers over the last year, they appeared to fall into a number of categories. In this book we have placed each letter into an appropriate category. The sections are as follows: Section 1. Your Irish Surname Each time we get a new reader on the “Letter from Ireland”, we ask for the Irish surnames in their family tree. These surnames often provide the best clues—and the worst red herrings—when you are tracking down the area your 4 Introduction ancestors came from in Ireland. They have mutated so much over the centuries due to translation, mistranslation, emigration and wishful thinking. In this section we look at the wider stories of your Irish surname and the places and family groups associated with that name. Section 2. The Counties of Ireland. Most of our readers associate their family with one or more of the thirty-two counties in Ireland. In this section, we tease out a little more about the surnames of these counties as well as their history and heritage. It is estimated that there are about sixty million people around the world of Irish descent (we currently have about six and a half million people on the island of Ireland). However, over 40% of the ancestors of this sixty million come from just six counties in Ireland: Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo and Donegal. This reflects the huge exodus from Ireland from the mid 1800’s as the Great Famine struck these counties with a large Gaelic population. Section 3. Famine and Emigration These two words have shaped so much of the Irish world outside Ireland over the last two hundred and fifty years. We had terrible famines during the 1700’s as well as the “Great Famine” of the mid 1800’s. The 1700’s saw the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Ulster Scots to the colonies