Irish names

As I fill in servants and supporting characters in my history-based fiction, I want to avoid stereotypical Irish names like Patrick or Moira. What were the given names of people who really lived in early modern Ireland?

I started with a primary source, the "Sufferings" of the Quakers in Moate Monthly Meeting — and immediately ran into the great dilemma of this type of research: who was Irish and who was English? Centuries of English colonization or "plantations" (preceded by Viking and Norman settlements), along with intermarriage, left a mixed populace. The question of whether a man was Irish or English might be restated as: "Which generation of English was he?"

The prefixes O' and Mac served as a guide as I scanned the indices of my reference books. MacLysaght also claims Crowe, Maloney, Brady, Cock and Spencer as Irish surnames. The best source for other surnames turned out to be The Grand Juries of County Westmeath, containing an appendix of family genealogies that takes up most of the book.

Given names for men

The most common are Daniel, Hugh, George, Edmond or Edmund, Sean, Thomas or Tom, and James. There were also several mentions of Torlogh or Turlough, Robert, Con or Conn, John, Eoin, Owen, Kevin, Brian or Bryan, Keadagh or Kedagh, Terence, and Donall, Donel, Donal.

More names: Denis, Fergal, Art, Redmond, Egan, Beare, Rory, Peadar, William, Michael, Ernie, Eamon or Eamonn, Dermot, Edward, Eddie, Antony, Anthony, Lucius, Jimmy, Cormac, Stephen, Henry, Raymond, Ramsey, Joe or Joseph, Martin, Frank, Art, Arthur, Seamus, Conor, Feagh, Charles, Cahir, High, Jeremiah, Patrick, Paddy, Colm, Allen, Neil, Neill, Shane, Abraham, Nial, Aghery, Christopher, Theobald, Nangle, Phelim, Mallachy, Maurice, Richard, George, Morgan, Conla, David, Hubert, Hume, Francis, Breasal, Thadeus, Garrett, Nathaniel, Peyton, Whitney, Francis, Logan, Theobald, Walter, Peter, and Cuthbert.

I primarily wanted early modern Ireland names, but Grand Juries also provides interesting ancient names with their Roman equivalents; you can see how they morphed into more modern names.

Duachus Galach, Duach, Errnin, Eogan (Owen), Fergusius, Feargna (Fergnaus), Achaius (Eochy Tiorm), Aodh Finn, Brenain, Cathalan, Arten, Orgaille (Orgallius), Brefny, Cu-Conachi (Constantine), Mac-nahighe or Macnahighe (Nicholaus), Tiernan, Godfrey (Godfridus), Maolsachlin (Mallachy), Giolla-Joso (Gelasius), Giola-Josa-Ruadh (Gelasius), Cathal (Cathaldus or Carolus), Donogh, Murketagh, Awly, Fergall, Andach, Morough, Matha (Mathew), Matthias, Rufus, Manus, Maolmordha, Philip, Cuconacht, Cormac, Mahon, Carbrey, and Fedlim (Phelim).

The names in Modern Ireland are more recent and possibly anglicized. They continue many of the names already listed, plus Justin, Connor, Frank, Oliver, Malcolm, Michael, Heber, Louis, Nevil, Samuel, Flann, Murrough, Mairtin, Feargus, Tomas, Cahir, Jeremiah, Sylvester, Ernest, and Philip.

Given names for women

By far, the most common name I found was Katharine, Catherine, Kate. Mary and Mary Anne also showed up several times.

Other names were Maud, Bernadette, Patricia, Rossa, Patsy, Nuala, Grace, Kitty, Dorcas, Genet, Margaret, Jane, Elizabeth, Susannah, Diana, Louisa, Ruth, Jane, Eleanor, Bridget, Sarah, Margaret, and Anne.

More ancient: Fedelonia, Indearva, Ranalt, Winifred, and Finguola (Penelope).

More modern (in addition to the names above, still in use): Deidre.

You'll notice I included nicknames and spelling variants. Here's a great resource on nicknames and how some names changed.

Arctic Ireland

You know how you look for a book on Amazon or eBay, knowing that it's probably out of print or hard to find? And sure enough, they don't have any copies, but you can put it on your "wish list." I was looking up something else on Amazon and happened to click on my wish list. To my surprise, several copies of of a book I wanted were now available. No pictures, no "look inside," but one of them was inexpensive and from a highly rated seller, so I ordered it.

Arctic Ireland, The extraordinary story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740-41, by David Dickson, arrived today and I couldn't wait to unwrap it! I wrote earlier this year about that coldest winter, during which my ancestor Joshua English and his family lived in Moate, County Westmeath, Ireland.

I immediately looked in the index for Moate. Sure enough, this book also mentions that 20 houses burned down in that small village during the drought that accompanied the Great Frost. No details, unfortunately. But, although the footnotes are all lumped together by page, I can generally figure out that the source was a Dublin newspaper, which is more than I had before.

Even though there's only that brief mention of Moate, now I have a whole book to read for background information, which will hopefully inspire me to get back to my novel. I took a break from my work-in-progress in August. Now that NaNoWriMo is over (that's a future post), it's time to get back to work.

Percolating - Joshua's story

As I work on scenes and chapters for the third generation in my story - Joshua English's life - I've been stumped because I don't know anything about Mary Holmes. I know she must be some relation of Richard Holmes, but I don't know how. He's about half a generation older than she, so not a father,  possibly an older brother but more likely a cousin. Her parents aren't mentioned in the wedding procedures, which often means that they're dead. So, not only is she a genealogical brick wall, but I have trouble filling in her character when I don't even know about siblings, background, anything. Everybody else in the novel has at least had a factual family.

As I draw a big blank with Mary, I'm having an inspirational week with Joshua. Little things, tidbits, that I read in the meeting minutes percolate in my head and sometimes boil over into revelations. For example, his marriage inquiry included Dublin, which means that he lived there at some point. Since they didn't have a schoolmaster in Moate, I was thinking he might have been sent to school there. This week, I had one of those head-on-the-pillow eureka moments: Joshua's emmigration request mentioned that he lived in some other area than Toorphelim (next to Moate). My eureka thought was that he didn't live on his father's farm; he lost his land! Which adds to the drive to come to America.

Joshua was a middle child, so inheritance may have gone to an older brother, John or Abraham. I've been wondering (and looking for) what happened to Joshua's brothers. Maybe, after his mother and John were disowned, the whole family moved to Dublin. But who lived on the family farm? Joshua's father left it in trust to the meeting, but if they gave it back to the family when one or more of the children came of age, they could have sold it.

I know that Joshua came back to live near Moate and married Mary Holmes. His little brother, Thomas, was at his wedding. Joshua had a family and survived the Great Frost. He must have been devastated when his daughter was disowned and brought disgrace to her parents. Without the family farm, there was nothing to keep him from wanting to emmigrate and start a new life.

The English family

I've added a new page, with a link at the top of this blog, with basic family tree information for the ENGLISH family. It's "under construction" - I'm not sure if I will add any more in the near future, but I may eventually add names all the way down to me, about 10 generations down from the Thomas English who first moved to Ireland.

One of my pet peeves is the inaccuracies perpetuated by people who don't understand the calendar that Quakers of this era used - fodder for a future post. For now, I'll just say that I've translated the dates into our modern calendar so that people who use this information won't make those mistakes.

Anyone who does 18th-century or earlier genealogy, please, please write down the dates exactly as you find them, using numbers and not words (1st month does not equal January). Thanks.

Reading between the lines in old records

Context is everything.

I'm indexing the men's meeting minutes of Moate Meeting (Quaker) in Ireland. I was working on 1753 tonight when I ran across the entry, that I'd found before, in which my ancestor Joshua English requested a certificate from the meeting to take with him to America. You can imagine how excited I was when I first saw this 1753 record!

4th mon: the 22
Joshua English haveing signified to some of this meeting his Intention of removeing with his family to some part of America and requesting a Certificate from friends of this meeting to friends (there) which, Upon Consideration how he and his family Stand as to Unity with friends it was Concluded that Such a Certificate as friends Could Safely give shoulde be (written) Up for him and brought to this meeting for aprobation which being done Now read approved and Signed John Robinson is appointed to record them in the proper booke and return acct thereof to next meeting.

Tonight, I read it again, knowing now that he and his family had been disowned around 1751, because of his daughter's running out and getting married by a priest. I had assumed that he had written a letter of apology and been taken back into the membership, because he had protested the whole time that he didn't allow the marriage. But the phrases "Upon Consideration how he and his family Stand as to Unity with friends" and "Such a Certificate as friends Could Safely give," added to the fact that he had asked through a friend and not attended the meeting himself, makes me think that he had not been accepted back into the meeting. 'Makes me a little sad for Joshua.

I've been unable to find the certificate they wrote, so far. I have a serious hope that it's in another record book, which is full of letters that are out of order. Unfortunately, they've never been indexed, and I don't have access to the book right now. I doubt I will find the letter before my book about the English family is finished. I do know that the letter was a good one, because it earned Joshua the "bounty" given to immigrants of good character when he arrived in South Carolina.

Indexing the Moate Meeting minutes

What fun, to come home and check the mailbox and find international mail!

During my trip to Ireland, I agreed to index the early records of the Moate Meeting (Quaker), specifically, minutes of the men's meeting in the 17th and 18th centuries (the women's minutes don't exist until later). It's a win-win deal: the Historical Library gets a volunteer indexer, and I get to find more records about my family than I could possibly have read during my trip. I started in 1742 and I'm about a third of the way through the first set.

The package I got this week has more records, through 1792! At first I was excited, then realized that my family (Joshua) left in 1753. I was hoping for the earlier records, or copies from a different book full of un-indexed letters. But, the reward for good work is more work. And, I thought, maybe I will find out what happened to Joshua's brothers. Regardless, I'm honored to have the job.

The coldest winter

As I try to fictionalize the story of my real ancestors, just to fill in the gaps, I keep finding that real life is more dramatic than I could ever imagine.

A great frost and famine plagued Ireland in 1740-1741. As if that weren't enough drama, I thought maybe my MC (main character) Joshua might fall through some ice and survive a bout of pneumonia, which would bring him and his wife closer. The first problem with that idea is that there are no loughs (lakes) in Moate, where the English family lived. I could, however, have them go to one of the fairs in Athlone or Mullingar, which have rivers and lakes. But a fair, during the worst of winter? Hmm.

I went back to Jonathan Bardon's A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes (highly recommend it) to read about the great frost. The stories are sobering; about one in five people in Ireland died during the "Year of the Slaughter." (The 19th-century famines were nothing to this, percentage wise.) Even the great ports, like Dublin, were frozen over so that boats couldn't come in. Then I saw, staring back at me on page 249, that the drought brought horrible fires with it, including 20 houses burned "in the village of Moate, Co. Westmeath." What?!!! Moate is not even in the index of this 531-page tome.

Twenty houses gone, in this small village, during two arctic years. How many houses were there? Could Joshua's house have been one of them? I thought that the Quaker records from Moate must mention something, so I checked. Drat! The second book of minutes, which I am indexing, starts in 1743! I looked over my notes from the first minute book, but I was just skimming for the English name during my trip.

I'm not sure where to go with this, yet. I'll have to figure out how many people lived in Moate that year. I do know that in my own 21st-century town of almost 10,000, losing 20 homes would be devastating.

Character conundrum - Elizabeth English

(spoiler alert!) As I try to write these chapters about young Elizabeth English, my mental image of her gets confused. After my research trip to South Carolina, when I knew her as an old maid aunt of colonial Camden, I pictured her as tall, aloof, light brown hair always tucked neatly under her bonnet. The sailors on the Hitchcock would have noticed her high cheekbones and lovely face.

I somehow forgot that vision during my research trip to Ireland. When I found out that a very young (14-15) Elizabeth ran away and married either a Catholic or Church of Ireland member, I pictured her as petite, with long, black, wavy hair and green eyes.

About this point, my friends usually say, Oh, you know everybody got married young back then. Not my family. Elizabeth's parents, grandparents and aunt didn't marry until their mid-20s at least! That may have been the Quaker influence and not necessarily what the general population did. I gather from the records that Quakers believed in choosing one's own mate as opposed to arranged marriages - but that mate had better be a Friend, and everybody and their brother had to approve the match, a very lengthy process.

Back to my conundrum. I can't seem to write these new scenes without my petite, raven-haired beauty. But practically, those features do not run in my family (except the green eyes), and she would have worn a modest bonnet all the time. Will that image fit into the second book, when she lives the hard life of an American pioneer?

Thomas!

I don't work on my novel on Sundays, since writing is my job as well as a passion. I went to the Nanowrimo write-in anyway, for coffee and fun. I took along some dead people to play with — some genealogy notes and blank paper to draw a family tree.

Tonight I was reading through the notes from my research trip to Ireland. You get so many facts running around in your head that sometimes you need to draw pictures or trees, and sometimes you just need to stare at a page or skim through your notes when you aren't doing anything in particular; just time to think. Sometimes those little facts running around my brain start colliding with each other, and that's when I solve mysteries.

For the past few years I've been wondering what happened to Joshua English's two surviving brothers, John and Abraham. He had many siblings that did not live past childhood. One of the little facts I planned to check on this trip was the death date of his baby brother Thomas, because the date was the same as when their father Thomas died.

Tonight, I had one of those wonderful little brain collisions. The incorrect death date (I found out it belongs to the father) collided with some old note I had written somewhere that said, "Who is this?" I did a search on my computer and found the note. There was a Thomas English at Joshua's wedding, long after their father Thomas had died. Joshua's little brother was at the wedding; Joshua's little brother lived!

I have another Thomas English.

Breaking through on the Holmes family

Spent more time than I expected today at the National Archives. I wanted to look up some wills that I had seen in the index at the National Library, but when I got there they told me that many of those had been lost in a fire. So I looked through the old-fashioned card file (half a wall of small drawers) and found that they didn't have the names I'd written down, but they had some others that I decided to look up just based on date.

Most of the research in Dublin has been a learning process; sometimes you ask for an old book, sometimes microfilms, sometimes a manuscript that's in another building. This time they brought me an envelope with two old notepads in it. The pads contained the tight scribbles of some previous genealogist who had written excerpts of the wills he had found - wills that may no longer exist.

The notes contained Peter Holmes, who had a daughter named Mary, and other family members. The hopeful clues are that her brother-in-law mentioned her as unmarried in 1717; my Mary wed about 1721. Then, her uncle had children that included Richard and Isabell; my Mary had a Richard and Isabell Holmes at her wedding!

I'll have to examine the years and relationships when I get home, but it looks like Mary, who married Joshua English and came to colonial South Carolina, may have parents named Peter and Briget! And I would never have known except for browsing the name at the Archives in Dublin.

Not to mention some unknown, kindred genealogical soul from perhaps the 1940s. Could my notebooks, my little scribbles be so useful to somebody, someday?

One amazing answer = many more little questions

Now I remember why I wanted to spend so much time in Dublin - the Quaker library. Today I found the request with Joshua planning to leave for America, no real details.

* Spoiler Alert!* (don't read this if my book is out and you haven't read it yet)
A while back I wrote about a Character Conundrum, thinking I'll never find out why Elizabeth English never married. She came to S.C. at age 18, during colonial times, and lived late into her 60s. Today the answer fell into my lap, in the Moate minutes. The truth was that she did marry, at an early age, apparently running off with a non-quaker and getting married by a priest! They don't mention the man's name, just that it had been done without her father's permission. So apparently, maybe a year later, the family whisked her away to colonial America - without the husband. Very sad in real life, but very exciting for my book. In the South Carolina histories, Elizabeth English never married, living as an old maid, because she already WAS married. Wow.

I still have to make up a lot of details, questions racing around my head. Who was the husband? young or old, Catholic or Church of Ireland, Romeo or wicked scoundrel taking advantage of a young girl? How did the family or community convince them to separate?