RECOVERED ANCIENT (PRE-SURNAME) GENEALOGIES OF MODERN IRISH FAMILIES

INDEXED BY SURNAME:

A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Y   Z

This is only a partial inventory of The Recovered Genealogies.  If you don't find your surname in our index, ask us about your Seanchas!  

If you know what report(s) you want, order below!

How Far Back Do Irish Genealogies Go?

An Ancient Tradition

The Seanchas tradition is Ireland's native tradition of law, history, and genealogy.  It's a wonderful thing to be able to trace your ancestors back through Ireland's English Language records for the last 200 years.  But Ireland's Seanchas tradition goes back to the 7th century in writing and orally for at least another 200-300 years before that.  In other words, the Irish have genealogical records for many hundreds of families which we can expect to be largely accurate since the 4th or 5th century unless purposefully manipulated in the early medieval period for political purposes.

These manuscripts have been nearly completely inaccessible to the Irish, their diaspora, and their genealogists since the 17th century.  Happily, over the last 50 years, some of the most important of these manuscripts have been set in type and finally published, in some cases having waited for the printing press for 350 to 850 years.  

Confidence

Also over the last 50 years, these surviving materials have been critically examined by leading Celtic scholars in order to separate fact from myth and legend, and to eliminate the many false tribal genealogies which were used as defense mechanisms and political expedients in Gaelic society.  Modern DNA research has already proven the accuracy of some of these ancient genealogies.  False genealogies already identified by leading Celtic scholars as suspect have also been confirmed as inaccurate.  In other words, the ancestries of hundreds of Irish families can now be reliably traced back to before the fall of the Western Roman Empire!  However, this cannot be done for all Irish families.