Furthest You've Traced Your Family History

This is a bit longer than I had expected!

Tom Bartlett's beautifully written and supremely informative Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation about eighteenth-century Ireland mentions that Charles O'Conor from Ballanagare in Roscommon could legitimately trace his family line back to Ruairí Ó Conchúir, the last High King of Ireland in the 12th century. That sort of traceable lineage is incredibly rare.

That O'Conor family of Ballanagare succeeded to the O'Conor lands in Clonalis House near Castlerea of the O'Conor Don branch in 1820 so, according to this website, 'are the only Royal Gaelic family left in Ireland, who are still living on part of their lands.'

The Hiberno-Norman Plunkett family of Dunsany in Meath, however, still live on the same lands they lived upon in the middle ages, and the chapel next to the castle (which has a stone from the 16th century commemorating its construction) is a precise replica of the medieval church across the road on the lands of their cousins, the Plunketts of Killeen Castle. The Killeen branch, which was the older and most senior branch of the Plunketts and remained Catholic, died out in the early 1980s and the widespread story is that the Plunketts of Dunsany, who 'conformed' (as opposed to 'converted') to the Anglican church, kept the Killeen Plunkett lands until after the relevant Penal Laws were repealed in the late 18th century, when they handed the land back. Not sure how true that is but it is widely believed.

Other than these Anglican and 'Castle Catholic' families, and perhaps a handful more (the Fitzgerald Knights of Glin in Limerick became dormant only in 2011, after 700 years, but cadet branches still survive), most Irish people, and especially Irish Catholics, cannot trace their families beyond the end of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair's 'longbhriseadh' ('shipwreck') of the Irish (c. 1649-c. 1800). Yes, they could trace generations back, but for the average dispossessed peasant that most of us come from I'd be looking closely at the sources for anything in the 18th century or indeed the early 19th century. They can make educated guesses about lacuna in their lineage, but solid documentary evidence for each generation is another matter. It's easier from the post-Famine period as the rise of the new ultramontane Roman Catholic Church, which was in control of literacy/large sections of the national school system, complemented by an emerging tenant class with rights and ultimately landowning class led to far more secular and ecclesiastical records. The more wealth you have, the more you need records to protect it. And more schooling means more people writing things down.

My father was born in an old British internment camp, of all things, and when the land commission were dividing up local landed estates in the 1930s his father wanted land on a particular estate. However, he got land on another estate on the grounds that somebody with his precise same first and last name was evicted from that land by Cromwell. An old uncle who was telling me this story years ago was sceptical about it, and this uncle was an absolutely amazing repository of folklore and placenames for every corner of his land and beyond. Nevertheless, I subsequently found out, in the Books of Survey and Distribution from the 1650s which recorded every single Irish Catholic landowner in 1641 and what they owned (so that the Cromwellians would know what they were taking as a reward for their financiers and soldiers), that sure enough somebody with the exact same name was the recorded owner of that land in 1641 that my grandfather got in the 1930s. My family have lived in that exact area for as long as anybody can remember. A Jesuit cousin could only trace the same paternal family back with absolute certainty to the 1840s, though. I think my maternal family were too poor/ordinary to trace beyond the standard online 1901/1911 censuses. Or, as my mother put it after attempting to answer my genealogical questions, 'We never thought about those questions'. The poor don't have as much that they want to remember, never mind record on paper. And despite the notions of some Irish today, most of us come from poor people who hadn't the luxury of being recorded.