Townland and Parish Names

The spelling of official [modern-day] townland names in the databases on this website follow the spellings used in the 1901 Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns of Ireland and the spellings on the Ordnance Survey maps.

In most of the databases the townland name entered in the Townland column will be the official [modern-day] spelling e.g. Altaghoney and Gorteade. However, particularly in the earlier databases you will find this kind of entry - Altaghoney [Altohoney] and Gorteade [Bollymonny]. In both instances the actual spelling of the townland name is different from the modern-day spelling so I have included the former in brackets beside the latter. As you can see in the Altaghoney example the actual spelling is simply a variant spelling. However, in the Gorteade example the name of the townland is completely different. Usually this only occurs in seventeenth-century databases. Clearly, some of my interpretations of these earlier spellings could be wrong. To a large extent I have relied on the suggested modern-day names, written in pencil, on the transcripts of sources such as the Hearth Money Rolls. However, some of these are wrong. I have also used Munn's book on place-names throughout the county, originally published in 1925, plus two more recent books published as part of the The Northern Ireland Place-Name Project undertaken by the Department of Celtic Studies, Q.U.B. - Gregory Toner's book on the Moyola Valley [1996] and Patrick McKay & Kay Muhr's book on Lough Neagh Places [2007]. More recently, I have had access to a database of unofficial place-names prepared by Terry Aiken and this has proved extremely useful in identifying townland names in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century sources.

Earlier sources also spell the names of parishes differently e.g. the parish of Killelagh in South Derry can appear as Killylough. Since there is less chance of making a mistake over these earlier spellings of parishes, I have [with one exception] simply used the most common modern-day spelling of parishes in the databases. The exception is the database of the 1796 Flaxgrowers' List. Here I have included [in brackets] the exact spelling of each parish used in the original document.

Surnames

Again with surnames, creating the databases was not always easy. Not surprisingly, the spelling of surnames in the original sources varied a great deal both within and between documents over the centuries. The names in these documents were entered by various officials and there is some evidence to suggest that this led to a regional spelling of surnames, particularly in the earlier sources. Certainly, the spelling of surnames had become more standardised by the time of the Griffith's Printed Valuation of c.1860. Remember too, that the originals of the seventeenth-century Hearth Money Rolls and the eighteenth-century Religious Returns were destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire. The only sources we now have are transcripts of those originals and many of these are typed, suggesting that they are probably a transcript of a transcript. Let's not forget that the databases are further transcripts! In transcription it is relatively easy to mistake an "e" for an "a" or an "r" for an "n" and so on.

The key problem in creating a database of names from original sources is to produce a database which is relatively easy to search and sort whilst, at the same time, remains true to the spelling of the names in the primary source. This is particularly the case with seventeenth and eighteenth-century sources.

Surnames in seventeenth-century sources were written down by officials who, if they were not familiar with the spelling of a surname, spelt it phonetically in a way that made sense to them.  For example, McGoldrick can be spelt as Megolrake, McCandless as Micandlass, Ewing as Youing, Brewster as Broster and so on.  However, the greatest problem with names in early sources is the fact that the spellings of some surnames in these documents are completely different from their modern equivalents e.g. in earlier documents Alexander often appears as McCalsenor or McElsinor.

When entering surnames into the county databases I have used two columns or fields in each database. One column contains the spelling of each surname as it appears in the original document. A second column contains standardised spellings of surnames which should make it easier to find names in the database and keep variant spellings of individual surnames together in a sort. Standardised spellings are not intended to replace the spellings that appear in the original documents and you can, of course, ignore the standardised spellings altogether and simply search the column that contains the actual spellings in the original source.

A selection of the standardised spellings used in the database can be seen in the table below. In drawing up this table I was guided by the following observations that I had made as result of working with surnames in various types of sources for the county over a period of some 200 years.

·         Regardless of the period, there are certain surnames such as Brown [Browne], Carr [Kerr], Dixon [Dickson], Gray [Grey], Maguire [McGuire], McGee [Magee], McGill [Magill] and Miller [Millar] that are spelt one way or the other. Nevertheless officials, for whatever reason, managed to misspell these names from time to time. Some of the misspellings e.g of Brown [Broon and Brune] suggest that phonetic spelling of names was quite common in earlier times. Clearly, a standardised name would overcome the problem of missing one of these names in a database. Deciding on a standardised spelling here is simply a matter of choosing one spelling or the other. Note that the one that I have chosen does not imply any priority of one spelling over the other. Nor, if one of these names apply to you, can you assume that your name was always spelt in the past the way that you spell it today.

·         Others surnames such as Cunningham, Hassan and  Stewart, for example, have more than one variant spelling in the sources that simply reflect the way officials spelt the name across the county at different times in the past. I have included examples of most of these variant spellings in the table below.

·         There are some surnames where their spelling in early documents bears no relation to their spelling in later documents. These include surnames such as Alexander [McCalsenor, McElsinor, etc. in earlier documents], Ballentine [Bannatyne, etc.], Bradley [Brillaghan, Brallahan, O'Brillaghan, O'Brullaghan, etc.], Cummings [Kimin, Kimming, etc.], McAfee [McDuffee, etc.], Pollock [Poake, Polke, etc.] and Trainor [McCreanor, McCraner, etc.]. I have used the later spelling as the standardised spelling to group together spellings of those surnames are very different from their modern equivalents.

·         Irish names, particularly those beginning with O’ or O and a space, can create problems in databases. Furthermore, in some periods officials included the O’ and at other times they dropped it. At first I thought about dropping the prefix O' in the standardised spelling of most Irish names and did so on my CD Researching Derry and Londonderry Ancestors. However, I decided to retain the O' prefix in the databases on this website. But, I should warn you that when looking for O'Kane, for example, you should consider also looking at Kane in nineteenth-century databases. If you are searching any of the Excel databases you should use a "contains" search where you type in Kane. This will "bring out" all of the Kanes, O'Kanes, McKanes, etc. My impression is that many people who are listed as Kanes in the 1831 and c.1860 databases may have been O'Kanes. In fact some may have been McKanes. Note that in the case of O'Mullan which tends to appear more so in the earlier databases and less frequently in the later databases, I have used the standardised name Mullan to include O'Mullan and its variant spellings. McMullans, McMullens, etc. and McMillens have been standardised as McMullan.

·         The other prefix which can cause chaos in a database is Mac or Mc. In most cases I have retained this prefix in surnames. Within the sources the Mc can appear as M', Mc, Mac, etc. I have always used Mc in the "standardised spellings" with no space between the Mc and the rest of the name. Note that some internet databases do put a space after the Mc. Quite often if I look for my own name under McAfee I get a nil result because the name is entered either as Mc Afee or M'Afee. I have dropped the Mc in a few cases and these can be seen in the table. They include Adams, Arthur, Clements, Conville, Conway, Cooke, Dougall, Knight, Michael, Nicholl, Reynolds and Taggart.

·         The following surnames Irwin/Irvine, McCaughey/McGaughey, McGeogh/McGeough and Louden/London have been standardised using the first name in the aforementioned list. I have done this because it is very difficult, particularly in the 1831 Census Returns where names are hand written, to distinguish between vowels in the handwriting. In other words some Irvines could be Irwins and vice-versa.

·         The following standardised surnames require individual explanations and are footnoted in the table below. These surnames are Canning, Connor, Crossan, Crothers, Donagh, Ferry, Fullen, Greeves, Hara, Kenny, Kerrigan, McIntyre, McGuigan, McNally, Sherrard and Steenson.

Finally, I should point out that I have been working with these surnames since, at least, 2000 and I have made changes to the way that I dealt with variant spellings in the individual databases. This can lead to a name being treated differently in some of the earlier and later databases. Apologies for that. If you come across such an instance, the best way to handle that is to revert back to the way a name has been spelt in column C "Surname as spelt in document" of the databases.

Further reading

Edward MacLysaght, The Surnames of Ireland (Dublin, 1973).

George F. Black, Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning and History (Edinburgh, 1999, first published in 1946).

Robert Bell, The Book of Ulster Surnames (Belfast, 1989).

Brian Mitchell, Surnames of Derry (Derry, 1992).

 Copyright 2018 W. Macafee.