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Irish Naming Patterns Placenames and family naming

Lorna Moloney produces and presents The Genealogy radio show and this airs weekly from wonderful Kilkee at Raidio Corcabaiscinn. Corcabaiscinn is the name for an old tribal region of county Clare. The radio show has over 100 shows podcast and all are available. You can listen to the genealogy radio show which is about Irish Naming Patterns and is titled: Irish Naming Patterns for Irish Family Research. The importance of Naming Patterns is often overlooked especially for research in the nineteenth century. This page shows some valuable sources for geographical locations, placenames and the pattern to identify when looking at your own family legacies. In addition if visiting Ireland, we provide research itineraries and develop tours for your bespoke research journey.

Placenames are essential for locating your branch of ancestors in Irish family History research. We look at this extensively during our family history research week as it can open up avenues of opportunity for you when researching. We can highly recommend Logainm as a free online source. It also has a translator which you can access below. It has wonderful glossary and distribution maps and help you make sense of the old Gaelic world of Irish placenames .

Dr Paul MacCotter who is a worldclass expert in the field of Irish Genealogy also has produced a blog at http://www.paulmaccotter.com/blog/ There are six parts to this blog and all are essential for researching Irish genealogy.

Ireland is divided into 32 counties. This division, begun in the 12th century, showing the English system of local government in Ireland. Their boundaries reflected the lordships of the major Gaelic families. http://www.eneclann.ie/20x20/brian-mitchell-irish-placenames/

For Naming Patterns in Families, it was rare to deviate off a pool of names common to the particular family. It is important for you to collate these names and then work out which order they used the naming pattern. Saints Names and Vernacular Saints names to an area or place can provide valuable clues to tracing your family history. We know that particular names were important as if a child died, then another child born later would be given the name of the dead infant or child. Richard Woodruff Price's essay titled 'Child Naming Patterns: A Tool to Assist with Family Reconstruction  provides many examples for all cultures, Dutch, Scottish and English and also has an excellent bibliography for further reading.

Nineteenth-century Irish family naming patterns usually follow the guidelines in the list below pretty closely. This was extracted from the Irish Genealogy Society International reference of “Find your Irish roots through family naming patterns” written by Stephanie Varney.

  1. The eldest son was named after the father’s father.
  2. The eldest daughter was named after the mother’s mother.
  3. The second son was named after the mother’s father.
  4. The third son was named after the father.
  5. The fourth son was named after the father’s oldest brother.
  6. The second daughter was named after the father’s mother.
  7. The third daughter was named after the mother.
  8. The fourth daughter was named after the mother’s oldest sister.

Knowing the traditional naming patterns helps you find your Irish roots by alerting you to clues of identifies you may have otherwise missed…

Waitbutwhy.com tree showing great-great-great-great-great Grandparents.

The tree by waitbutwhy also shows how many great-great-great-great-great Grandparents we have, 128 in a relatively short space of time. This is where what we need to remember when we are looking at DNA results and our matches and it also shows that you would have a lot of locations to research for Irish family History research.

Lorna Moloney Lorna is the resident genealogist of Dromoland Castle and Lorna is a professional genealogist, and Document Content Management Specialist. She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogist and the Society of Genealogists UK. Lorna is the Resident Genealogist for Dromoland Castle in County Clare. Lorna acted as Project Genealogist for George Boole *200 genealogy project for University College Cork, Sunday Times University of the Year for 2016 & 2017. This year Clans and Surnames took place at Nenagh from May 15 - 19 in 2017 and was based in the wonderful GN Abbeycourt Hotel, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary.

Lorna produces and presents the successful show: 'The Genealogy Radio show' aired each thursday at 4p.m. from beautiful Kilkee, Co. Clare at Raidio Corcabaiscinn and Podcasts are available at http://www.clansandsurnames.com/the-genealogy-radio-show/. Series 6is titled: Clans and Surnames of Ireland.

Lorna Moloney's thesis, ‘From Gaelic Lordship to English Shire'– the Anglicisation of MacNamaras Clare ′, is being supervised by Professor Steven Ellis. Her academic profile can viewed at http://nuigalway.academia.edu/LornaMoloney . She has delivered conference papers at Oxford; Lincoln College: Exploration of the Medieval Gaelic Diet: (2012); seminar papers at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway, 'The Gaelic Lordships in Thomond, c. 1400-c.1500' and papers at Irish Conference of Medievalists on themes of Brian Boru and landscape of East Clare. Lorna has published on medieval themes and on maritime subjects. Lorna received her Certificate for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy (CAFG) in Dallas in March 2015. Her work and presentations can be viewed at academia,edu.

Our show airs from Raidio Corcabascinn in beautiful Kilkee, Co. Clare which is dedicated to community empowerment

Community radio, educational disadvantage and supporting the community. There is a great team behind the show, Steven Baddy, Mike Curran, Sadhb Smyth, to name just a few. It is produced and presented by Lorna Moloney. Lorna is a professional genealogist and historian.

We fully recommend John Grenham's subscription site which is an annual membership charge. It is a ***** recommendation from us.

Our recommendations include books, website, sources and resources and we do hope you will check them out at www.lornamoloney.com and www.clansandsurnames.com

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