Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Planters surnames?

Options
  • 18-11-2017 9:06am
    #1
    DEFTLEFTHAND
    Registered Users Posts: 16,500 ✭✭✭✭


    Adams, Stanley, Featherstone, Loftus.

    Please add more, I'm researching planter families for a project on the plantations of Ireland.


«1

Comments

  • Options
    #2
    RayM
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,973 ✭✭✭RayM


    Stroll through any old Church of Ireland graveyard and you'll see plenty of planter surnames (and quite a few soupers too).


  • Options
    #3
    maisiedaisy
    Registered Users Posts: 96 ✭✭maisiedaisy


    Graham, Richardson, Deane, Burns, Beamish, Jennings, Salter, Tanner, Hyland, Fisher, Ferguson, Johnson, Johnston, Abbott, Chapman, Roycroft, Allen. Vary with location, the idea of walking through a local COI/Methodist graveyard isn’t a bad one.

    Not all Protestant names are necessarily planter names though. Anything that sounds French is probably of Huguenot extraction, they were refugees as opposed to planters. There’s a few other similar minoroties, the Palatines in Limerick are ones that spring to mind.


  • Options
    #4
    lazybones32
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,647 ✭✭✭lazybones32


    The first planters here (where i am) were Welsh and there are still a lot of Walsh/Walshes and a few Jones'. Very few Smith's.


  • Options
    #5
    gozunda
    Registered Users Posts: 18,996 ✭✭✭✭gozunda


    You could be at it a while. There are many many names on record. Try the 1641 depositions which gives names and locations

    See:
    http://1641.tcd.ie

    Some ones I'm familiar with ...
    Aallan
    Bennett
    Blackburn
    Dawson
    Kincaid
    Sampson
    Richardson



    Best of luck ...


  • Options
    #6
    fepper
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,434 ✭✭✭fepper


    Down here in Kerry it would be crosbie,latchford, blennerhasset,mccowen,gleasure.


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #7
    Buford T. Justice XIX
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,633 ✭✭✭✭Buford T. Justice XIX


    Mod Note: Please note the change of forum as rules differ between forums.

    I've moved this thread to History & Heritage as it appears the most suitable forum for the subject.

    Buford T. Justice.


  • Options
    #8
    donegaLroad
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,379 ✭✭✭donegaLroad


    maisiedaisy wrote: »
    Graham, Richardson, Deane, Burns, Beamish, Jennings, Salter, Tanner, Hyland, Fisher, Ferguson, Johnson, Johnston, Abbott, Chapman, Roycroft, Allen. Vary with location, the idea of walking through a local COI/Methodist graveyard isn’t a bad one.

    Not all Protestant names are necessarily planter names though. Anything that sounds French is probably of Huguenot extraction, they were refugees as opposed to planters. There’s a few other similar minoroties, the Palatines in Limerick are ones that spring to mind.


    French sounding surnames can also be Norman. The French arrived in England with the army of William the Conqueror, and eventually were granted areas of land here during the Norman invasion of Ireland.

    Full list of Ulster plantation surnames here OP


  • Options
    #9
    server down
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,613 ✭✭✭server down


    donegaLroad wrote: »
    French sounding surnames can also be Norman. The French arrived in England with the army of William the Conqueror, and eventually were granted areas of land here during the Norman invasion of Ireland.

    Full list of Ulster plantation surnames here OP

    That’s just all common surnames.

    As for the French names of the Normans - they are relatively well know. All the Fitzs for instance.


  • Options
    #10
    donegaLroad
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,379 ✭✭✭donegaLroad


    server down wrote: »
    That’s just all common surnames.

    As for the French names of the Normans - they are relatively well know. All the Fitzs for instance.

    yes, and Britton (Bretton), Harvey, Joyce, Tobin, Purcell and Beamish are all French Norman. So is my own but Im not going to disclose it here. :)


  • Options
    #11
    gozunda
    Registered Users Posts: 18,996 ✭✭✭✭gozunda


    Del.Monte wrote: »
    What about the majority of them (down here anyway) who keep their heads down and get on with their lives? Who are the 'real' Irish anyway? By the time you have removed everybody who arrived here from 1170 onwards, or who intermarried with them, you won't have many left?

    Yup - always thought I was a melange of Viking, Norman, Irish etc - until I did the Ancestry DNA test for ethnicity. Looks like my lot going back not only stayed genetically in roughly the same geographical location but also stubbornly avoided marrying or mixing with any of the successive waves of new inhabitants - made for some interesting reappraisal of what was thought to be the family story ...


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #12
    tabbey
    Registered Users Posts: 1,943 ✭✭✭tabbey


    Most surnames not of Milesian heritage, or Viking / Norman /Huguenot etc. In other words names that are self explanatory in English;

    Occupational names : Baker, Carpenter etc,

    Descriptive names : Long, Short, Stout, Thynne, Brown, White etc.

    Geographical names : Hill, Forrest, Waters, Lancashire, Cardiff etc.

    Finally the English equivalent of our patronymic names : Johnson, Jackson, Wilson (son of William), Watson (son of Walter) etc.


    It must not be assumed that someone with an English name is descended though the paternal line from an Englishman. He could have adopted such a name for ease of mixing with other people in an English speaking area, He could have been obliged under statute, if living within the Pale, to take such a name, he might have become known by his master's name, or in the 17th and 18th centuries, his name might have been altered by official record keepers to something intelligible. The numerous Smiths in Cavan come to mind.

    Most Irish people with traditional Irish names assume they are pure bred Irish, but in their ancestry, they will generally find English names


  • Options
    #13
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    tabbey wrote: »
    It must not be assumed that someone with an English name is descended though the paternal line from an Englishman . . .
    Still less that he is descended from a planter. The great majority of people who came to Ireland from Britain and settled here did not arrive as part of any plantation.

    We have plantation records, and from those we can identify the names of planters who came over. But someone today who shares that name is not necessarily descended from a planter, since other people of the same name may have come over independently of any plantation, and he could be descended from them.
    tabbey wrote: »
    Most Irish people with traditional Irish names assume they are pure bred Irish, but in their ancestry, they will generally find English names
    At this stage pretty well everybody has mixed Gael and Gall heritage. For most of the time the two communities intermarried quite freely.


  • Options
    #14
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »
    Adams, Stanley, Featherstone, Loftus.

    Please add more, I'm researching planter families for a project on the plantations of Ireland.

    Get a copy of Burke's Irish Landed Gentry. Pick out what you want and then research what families suit your project, noting that not all families were granted land, many of them bought it. As others have said the surnames on their own do not necessarily mean 'planter'.


  • Options
    #15
    FredFunk
    Registered Users Posts: 61 ✭✭FredFunk


    lazybones32 wrote: »
    The first planters here (where i am) were Welsh and there are still a lot of Walsh/Walshes and a few Jones'. Very few Smith's.

    Walsh(e) came in with Strongbow.
    Planters are either up north or Laois/Offaly


  • Options
    #16
    Ipso
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,995 ✭✭✭Ipso


    Anyone know if many Catholics would have come over in the Plantation? There's a good chance my male line came over in the Plantation (or right before it), I'm Catholic and I'm not aware of any non Irish ancestry (granted that doesn't mean much for Irish people).


  • Options
    #17
    tabbey
    Registered Users Posts: 1,943 ✭✭✭tabbey


    Ipso wrote: »
    Anyone know if many Catholics would have come over in the Plantation? There's a good chance my male line came over in the Plantation (or right before it), I'm Catholic and I'm not aware of any non Irish ancestry (granted that doesn't mean much for Irish people).

    Due to Ne Temere etc, the great majority of offspring from mixed marriages during the last two centuries have ended up catholic.


  • Options
    #18
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    tabbey wrote: »
    Due to Ne Temere etc, the great majority of offspring from mixed marriages during the last two centuries have ended up catholic.
    Ne Temere only came in just over a century ago; it can't account for anything that happened earlier than that. And, in fact, its main purpose was not to ensure that the offspring of mixed marriages were raised Catholic; it was to ensure that mixed marriages did not happen in the first place, in which it was remarkably successful, up to about 50 years ago. I've argued elsewhere that the effect of this was not to erode the minority Protestant population, but to sustain it.

    Catholics did come over in the plantations; the first systematic plantation was of (what is now) Laois and Offaly and it happened under Mary Tudor, when being Catholic was eminently acceptable to the English authorities, and (I suspect) Catholics would have been positively favoured as planters. They certainly would not have been excluded. However the plantation wasn't notably successful. It took decades before the native Irish could be, um, pacified, and the planters were mostly clustered in settlements around English military installations. There would have been strong incentives to identify with the government, and with the Elizabethan reformation I'd be surprising if any Catholic planters did not conform. But I don't actually know.

    Later plantations took place under a Protestant English establishment, but I don't know that there was any formal or systematic ban on Catholics taking up land. Essentially the plantations were franchised out; wealthy "undertakers" took up large tracts of land, and it was then up to them to find large numbers of settlers to occupy and farm them. It wasn't easy finding settlers, and the undertakers wouldn't have welcomed restrictions on who could be settled, so they wouldn't have favoured a "no Catholics" rule.


  • Options
    #19
    pinkypinky
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 6,616 Mod ✭✭✭✭pinkypinky


    OP: what are the terms of reference for your project? Which plantations? Any name that might have been a planter name would be massively diluted now.

    Genealogy Forum Mod



  • Options
    #20
    tabbey
    Registered Users Posts: 1,943 ✭✭✭tabbey


    Peregrinus wrote: »
    Ne Temere only came in just over a century ago; it can't account for anything that happened earlier than that.

    Ne Temere was merely a restatement of existing policy.


  • Options
    #21
    Jimbob1977
    Registered Users Posts: 2,239 ✭✭✭Jimbob1977


    Names like Switzer and Bovenizer would be Hugenot and Palatine.

    If planter is from the Plantation of Ulster, you'd be talking about Scots and English Protestant names like Campbell, Cameron, Craig, Wilson, Jackson, Wright


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #22
    Ipso
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,995 ✭✭✭Ipso


    I think Campbell could be from an existing gaelic name that got anglicised. I can't remember it but it meant crooked mouth, something like Ceath Beal (I also heard that the Laverty in its Gaelic form sometimes got anglicised to Armstrong).
    Campbell is also supposed to be associated with the Redshank mercenaries who arrived prior to the plantation.


  • Options
    #23
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Ipso wrote: »
    I think Campbell could be from an existing gaelic name that got anglicised. I can't remember it but it meant crooked mouth, something like Ceath Beal (I also heard that the Laverty in its Gaelic form sometimes got anglicised to Armstrong).
    Campbell is also supposed to be associated with the Redshank mercenaries who arrived prior to the plantation.
    Lots of Scottish names come from Gaelic names - Scots Gaelic. So, yeah, there are Gaelic-origin names among the Ulster planters. "Campbell" is one of them.


  • Options
    #24
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    tabbey wrote: »
    Ne Temere was merely a restatement of existing policy.
    I don't think it was. The previous canon law on the subject, in the decree Tametsi, did not require a commitment to bring up the children of a mixed marriage as Catholics, or an acknowledgement from the non-Catholic partner. Actual practice varied widely; some bishops/priests required this before they would celebrate a marriage (or allow it to be celebrated) others did not. What Ne Temere did was to take the practice which had prevailed in some dioceses, elevate it into a legal rule, and apply it universally.

    But, as already pointed out, it's practical effect was not mainly that the children of mixed marriages were raised Catholic; it's principal effect was that there were very few mixed marriages, with the result that Protestants mainly married other Protestants, and their children were raised as Protestants.


  • Options
    #25
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    pinkypinky wrote: »
    OP: what are the terms of reference for your project? Which plantations? Any name that might have been a planter name would be massively diluted now.

    Autosomal DNA would show a big mix/dilution Pinky, but Y-DNA would remain the same, and that is the critical one, as the surname follows the male line. McLysaght wrote that there were about 250 Irish surnames mistranslated into English, so Y-DNA would be the most appropriate route shouold there be a question over origin.

    The OP seems to have lost interest as he has made nine posts elsewhere since his last visit here. His question also is not very precise, naming the Fetherstone family as Planters, when in fact the Irish lot in general descend from Cromwellian soldiers who would best be described as ‘Settlers’. There also were ‘Adventurers’ who advanced cash to the Commonwealth in the expectation of being repaid in Irish land when hostilities ceased.

    I would be closer to Tabbey’s views and differ slightly from the views of Peregrinus on RC’s being part of Plantations (and certainly in the Cromwellian era they could not have been.) The anti-papist sentiment in England was to the fore during the reign of Elizabeth, who was trying to impose the English language, customs and the Protestant faith in Ireland. The aristocratic recusants in England already were under pressure in her reign. I can think of only one Planter family of that era that was RC – the Brownes (Kerry), the others were Anglican. I cannot see how many English RC’s could be allowed to settle in Ireland when the purpose was to stamp out disloyalty to the Crown and spread the Anglican faith. It is possible that a Protestant planter could bring across some RC workers from his English estate, but that would be the exception. At that time most ‘local’ Catholics were allowed remain on the land but only as servants. The reason was well-explained during the Commonwealth by Colonel Ingoldsby, Governor of Limerick who wrote that "They were useful as earth-tillers and herdsmen” and "Deprived of their clergy, and living among the English settlers, they would become, eventually, Protestants, and loyal subjects to the Parliament.”)

    I also disagree with Peregrinus on intermarriage. In the period after 1650 interfaith marriage was much more frequent that admitted, despite being banned and subject to various penalties under the Penal Laws. The main reason was either remain celibate or marry a RC. Younger sons had little to gain under primogeniture and thus little to lose by marrying a Catholic girl. Other factors were a lack of Established Church girls of marriageable age, a surfeit of male Settlers and a lack of RC men. In addition to the huge losses of life due to the rebellions/wars from 1640 onwards, there was a mass exodus of young Irish males. For example we know that about forty thousand Irishmen went into the services of the Kings of Spain, France, and Poland, and served with distinction in the lowcountries and elsewhere on the continent. Given the population of Ireland of the era, that was a huge chunk.

    My earliest ancestor in Ireland came from a staunchly Protestant family (split Royalist / Roundheads) and his grandson, my direct ancestor married a Catholic, was disinherited and struck from the pedigree. By the 1750’s there were several other lines in the family that had converted as a result of intermarriage. There are no C of I branches of my family extant in Ireland and the ‘founder’s’ only Anglican descendants live in the US, having gone there in the early 1800’s.

    We had a discussion on Names HERE


  • Options
    #26
    riffmongous
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 12,629 Mod ✭✭✭✭riffmongous


    Mod Note: Since the thread is still going and the quality has improved dramatically, I've gone through the thread and deleted any off topic or After Hours style posts to try clean it up.


  • Options
    #27
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Just to be clear, Pedro, my comment about Ne Temere reducing intermarriage does in fact relate to the period when Ne Temere was in operation, which basically is 1907 to 1970. During that period rates of Catholic/Protestant intermarriage were extremely low.

    I entirely accept that, in earlier times, they were much higher, but it wasn’t necessarily or normally the case that in a mixed marriage all the children were raised Catholic, and church law did not require it. I think what mostly happened is that things played out in one of two ways:

    (a) One of the parties would convert in order to marry, so that the marriage would not, strictly speaking, be a mixed marriage. The children would then be raised in what was now the faith of both the parents. You have to reckon that, earlier on, with the legal and social advantaged attached to Anglicanism, it might be the Catholic spouse that converted to Anglicanism but, as the relative advantages of Anglicanism/disadvantages of Catholicism were eroded the Catholic aversion to conversion would assert itself more and more strongly, but I don’t know that we have any hard figures on this. Like you, I have a traditionally Protestant surname, but my family has been Catholic for several generations. An ancestor converted in the first half of the nineteenth century in order to marry a niece of the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore (and in those more enlightened times there was no question of his being disinherited for doing so) and since then the Catholic branch of the family has thrived, while the Protestants are all but extinct.

    (b) The spouses would maintain their separate religions, with the children being raised the faith of the parent of their sex - girls in the mother’s faith, boys in the father’s. That’s the state of affairs depicted in one of Trollope’s Irish novels, Phineas Finn, where the protagonist comes from a family in this situation. Trollope presents it as a completely unremarkable state of affairs in Irish society at that time, giving rise to no disapprobation even from the Catholic bishop (who is a minor character in the novel) and not one that requires detailed explanation to his (largely English) readership.

    As regards Catholics in the plantations, I completely agree with you about the Cromwellian plantations. As regards the Elizabethan planations, yes, the government would have wanted Protestant settlers, but such was the difficult in finding anyone to be a settler at all that I think Adventurers might have been a bit lax about enforcing that rigorously. But all I’m saying there is that there might have been some Catholic settlers; the great bulk would have been Protestants. Only in the Marian settlements would Catholics have been welcome or encouraged, and many of those would have conformed during the Elizabethan period anyway.

    Tl;dr version: anyone descended from a planter who is now a Catholic, it’s almost certainly the result of conversion/intermarriage since the plantation, rather than because of descent from a Catholic planter.


  • Options
    #28
    server down
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,613 ✭✭✭server down


    I’ll try find a link but I too remember reading that Ne Temere caused intermarriage to drop off a cliff.

    Prior to that intermarriage was common enough and bringing up the children of such marriages as catholic was also common although this probably was an agreement between the couples not something imposed on high. This diluted the number of Protestants. If we assume that women got to choose the religion and the surname was patrilineal then you’d get English Protestant names inherited by catholic children. (And to a lesser extent vice versa. Gerry Adams for instance)



    This clearly must have been the case, my surname is English (not Norman etc.) and my research (which has a huge gap) indicates the earliest Irish records of that name in my fathers ancestors homelands are Protestant.

    When the records pick up again we are catholic.

    This is true of many English originated names i Ireland and not all of them would be old English.


  • Options
    #29
    tabbey
    Registered Users Posts: 1,943 ✭✭✭tabbey


    One branch of my ancestry dating back to a marriage in a Church of Ireland 1790, appears to have been a mixed one with catholic daughters and protestant sons. Both the surnames suggest both sides were C of I a generation earlier. By the following generation this family seem to be all RC. I cannot be certain because there are gaps in baptismal registers about this time,and some boys may have remained protestant.

    A similar situation is topical this year. Father John Sullivan SJ, who was beatified earlier this year, was the product of a mixed marriage, and raised as a protestant. He then became catholic and entered the Jesuits. Presumably the influence of his catholic mother and sisters played a role in this conversion.
    Because catholics were a substantial majority of the population in most of Ireland, unless fairly well off, it was difficult for a protestant living in many parts of Dublin, to completely avoid being influenced to some degree, by the religious persuasion of their neighbours.


  • Options
    #30
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,056 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Mixed marriages, with the children being raised 50/50 in each faith, will always tend to undermine the minority community.

    Suppose you have a society divided 80:20 between Tabbists and Peregrinists. Each mixed marriage involves one Tabbist and one Peregrinist. A moment's though will show that the rate of mixed marriages among Peregrinists will be four times higher than amount Tabbists; if 12.5% of the Tabbists are entering into mixed marriages, then 50% of the Peregrinists are.

    Assuming that all marriages are equally fertile, with that intermarriage rate in any generation 6.25% of the children born to Tabbists are raised as Peregrinists, but 25% of the children born to Peregrinists are raised as Tabbists. You can see how this will play out over a few generations.

    But you don't have to model it in hypothetical terms; The Republic in the 20th century in fact provides a controlled experiment. During the Ne Temere years you have a vanishingly small rate of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants but, among Protestants, a high rate of intermarriage between different denominations. And, low, the minor Protestant denominations - the Presbyterians, the Methodists -
    decline steeply, because so many of their children are raised as Anglicans. Whereas the Protestant community as a whole holds up much better, albeit that it becomes increasingly mono-Anglican.

    The phenomenon works even faster than the maths would suggest, because in the real world the propensity to raise children of a mixed marriage in one denomination or the other is not, in fact, 50/50. In many cases the couple may end up going to, e.g, an Anglican rather than a Methodist church, and sending their children to an Anglican rather than a Methodist school, simply because while they are equally open to doing either there are many more Anglican churches and schools than Methodist ones, and the one that is convenient for them is likely to be an Anglican one. Plus, of course, not all denominations/traditions do take a neutral attitude to conversion across denominations; for a Catholic to become a Protestant, or a Protestant to become a Catholic, is generally a much bigger deal than, say, for a Methodist to become a Congregationalist.

    Long-term, the best survival strategy for a minority community is not to intermarry. (Which explains the extraordinary persistence of minority Jewish communities over many generations in many countries across the world.)


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #31
    DEFTLEFTHAND
    Registered Users Posts: 16,500 ✭✭✭✭DEFTLEFTHAND


    Actually took notice of the poster RayM here and took a look at some of the gravestones at my local COI churchyard.

    Some beauitful names both Christian and sur. Jerimiah Hastings was my fav, he died in 1972.


    God rest them all.


Advertisement