Month: June 2020

Historic Irish forenames have a reputation for being dull and repetitive to the point of madness. Mary John Mary John Mary John Mary John Mary …

It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of a John Sullivan in Kenmare in 1840 with fourteen first cousins, forty second cousins, two uncles and six great-great grandparents all called John Sullivan who thought it might be a good idea to name his son … John Sullivan. But he did. And  his fourteen first cousins, forty second cousins, two uncles and six great-great grandparents also called their sons John.

Look more closely and the picture gets more nuanced. There are  strong local associations between some forenames and specific localities. You’ll almost never find a Cornelius or a Jeremiah or a Bartholomew or a Hanorah outside Munster.  Sabina (or Sally) is heavily associated with Galway and Connacht. A Philip is most likely from the Cavan/Monaghan/Fermanagh area. (But most Phillip McCabes had fourteen first cousins, forty second cousins, two uncles and six great-great grandparents all called Phillip McCabe). Gobnait is almost excusive to the Caherciveen area. Festus or Festy is only found in west Galway, around Clifden.

Knowing there were bound to be instances like this that I’d missed, I set off to mine the civil birth records 1864 to 1913. And ended up mapping them all.

As always, a visualisation makes some things jump out. Kieran is almost exclusively a Westmeath/Offaly name. But spelt ‘Kyran’, it’s almost exclusively Kilkenny.

 

Abigail is common only in two distant areas, around Belfast and in south-west Cork. Roger appears almost only in Connacht and Munster.

The main insight, especially from browsing the names, is that mis-spellings and mistranscriptions are depressingly common. And that some names are so numerous your computer will explode if it tries to map them all, so I left them out.  A full list, with the mind-boggling numbers of registrations, is below.

You can play with all of these for free yourself in the Names section of the site. Enjoy.

The most common Irish forenames 1864 to 1913

Note “Unknown” at No. 10 with almost 200,000 registrations. Many Lying-in Hospitals in urban areas block-registered newborns with surnames only. Be warned.

I’ve often wondered about those individuals who run out of their own ancestors but just refuse to give up. Sometimes they seem like Wil E. Coyote, who runs over the edge of the cliff and just keeps going. But many turn to transcribing records  to scratch that itch, and in the process provide the rest of us with invaluable shortcuts for often-obscure sources.

The granddaddy of them all was Dr. Albert E. Casey, an Alabama pathologist who had ancestors from Sliabh Luachra on the Cork/Kerry border. Dr. Casey’s response to the lack of records was simple and breathtaking. He collected and transcribed every single record of any description for the region and adjoining parts, an area roughly bounded by the towns of Mallow, Killarney, Tralee and Newmarket: parish registers, civil records, property records, court proceedings, will indexes, newspapers, townland maps, gravestone inscriptions – everything.

And he didn’t stop there. He went on to collect anything he could find relating to all of Cork and Kerry before about 1825, everything on Munster before 1625 and an extraordinary assortment of early printed and manuscript works covering medieval Ireland as a whole. The whole compilation was published in 16 indexed volumes over the 19 years from 1952 to 1971, with the strange title O’Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and the Upper Blackwater in Ireland. You can see the full awe-inspiring list of contents at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlker/caseydescription.html .

Now someone else has stepped up to the plate. John McDonald Pepper evidently has Longford ancestors – he has produced meticulously painstaking transcriptions of two Longford Catholic parish censuses, for the parish of Granard in 1834 and the parish of Streete in 1856. He approached me for advice about making them available, so I offered.

Initially, I was going to disassemble them into database tables, but the care John has taken to reproduce the precise written formats deserves to be preserved, so instead I converted them to searchable PDFs.

Enjoy: Granard (1834) and Streete (1856).  And full credit to John.