0601A

What's your name ? What was your mother called? And her mother? What was your father's mother's name? Most of us know at least a few of the surnames that make up the heritage of our own families. But what do these names mean and where did they come from ?

The surnames of Ulster in the north of Ireland stem from many different peoples and many eras and can be difficult to unravel. The Cruthin (pronounced Crewhin), the Pictish race that inhabited the province before the invasion of the Gaels, have left virtually no mark on our surnames, not surprisingly, since hereditary surnames only came into being in the province in the 10th century and only became widespread in the 11th. The arrival of the Vikings, too, predated the rise of a surname system, but they left a legacy of personal names, many of which became popular in Gaelic society and were eventually incorporated into Irish surnames: MacManus, for instance, derives from the Norse personal name Magnus.

From the 12th century the Anglo-Normans and then the English brought their surnames to Ulster through the Pale and its outposts on the coasts of Down and Antrim. Scottish mercenary families, the famed gallowglasses, were brought to the province by the warring �clans� of Ulster and quickly adapted to and settled in Ulster Gaelic society. Many of their names are well documented - MacCabe, McDonnell, MacSweeney - but research is still required to unravel the complexities of some.

Before the Plantation period in the 1600s, the gallowglass influence is only a part of the Scottish connection in the surnames of Ulster. Many of the Scottish clans claim descent from the same (historical and legendary) figures as their Irish equivalents, and from the time of the creation of the Irish Dalriadic kingdom in Scotland, the two regions and their surnames have been closely related through language, alliance, war, marriage, migration and trade.

Add to this the most significant influx of names of all, the Plantation of the early 17th century, and the variety and complexity of the problem of Ulster surnames begins to become obvious.

Further, the domination of Ulster by the English from the 17th century has meant dramatic changes in the forms of the indigenous Irish names of the province. From the enactment of the Statute of Kilkenny in 1397 the English Crown made attempts to forbid the use of Irish names, but it is thought that such legislation in itself made little impression. After the Plantation, however, English administrative officials, of government and of individual landlords, were unable or unwilling, or both, to accept Irish forms of names, and in the ensuing centuries widespread anglicisation of these names took place. One of the few names to survive virtually unscathed is the one that is most identified with Ulster, O'Neill (in Gaelic � N�ill).

The prefixes Mac- and particularly O� disappeared, though many families have resumed them since the late 19th century. Names were anglicised to a form in English that approximated to the Gaelic sound. Thus � Dubhthaigh became O�Duffy, then Duffy. Very many, however, acquired or were given an English or Scottish name that was often only vaguely similar to the sound; thus Mac Cuinneag�in was made Cunningham. Others were translated or half-translated or mistranslated. Exactly the same processes happened in Gaelic Scotland - Mac Th�mais (MacThomas), for instance, became Holmes.
A very great deal remains to be done to understand more fully the history of surnames in Ulster particularly at a local level. As Fr Peadar Livingstone pointed in his invaluable studies of Fermanagh and Monaghan, an Irish Gaelic name famous nationally as originating in one county may be of a different derivation in part of another.

In 1603, when James VI of Scotland became also James 1 of England, he set out to �pacify� the Borders, now his �Middle Shires�, home of the turbulent and notorious riding clans. The following decade saw a ruthless programme there of executions, banishments, transportations and the seizure of lands by the crown. The power of these clans and their social system was broken forever. Many members of these broken clans opted for a new life in Ulster to escape persecution, the Plantation just getting underway at the time. They settled principally in Fermanagh and by the mid-17th century the names of the riding clans - Johnston, Armstrong, Elliott, Irvine, Nixon, Crozier and so on - had come to predominate in that county, managing to weather the storm of the 1641 rising which had largely destroyed the Plantation settlement in other counties.

In the text reference is repeatedly made to Gaelic Ulster septs as �erenaghs�. This term means that the family concerned had control over the church lands of a particular parish in the medieval period. This information is included because it denotes that such septs were very important or powerful in their district and, in the main, that they were based in those particular parishes.

There was a time when no one had a hereditary surname. The Norman Conquest in England of 1066, is a convenient point at which we can note the appearance of the first family names, but the Normans certainly did not have a fully developed surname system. It had not been then their conscious policy to identify a family by one name, but the idea was soon to occur to them. There is every sign that it would also have occurred spontaneously to the people they conquered, but the Norman campaign certainly helped speed things along.

Generally speaking, before the 11th century, our remote ancestors had single personal names which were quite enough to distinguish them in the small communities in which they lived. Personal names were either well-established name elements, or permutations of such elements. These in turn usually referred to abstract qualities such as �nobility� and �fame�. A new single-element name, or a new permutation, was given to every child, so that everyone in the community was given a truly personal name. Natural duplication must have caused the same name to come into being simultaneously in different communities, but names were not deliberately re-used.

More in Part B on Page 0601B.