Re: O'Mara Spelling in Ireland 1848-64
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In reply to:
Re: O'Mara Spelling in Ireland 1848-64
LOUIS HOFFMAN 6/04/98
Louis:It's my understanding that in a large number of cases the prefixes of O Mc Mac were dropped during the Penal Years; apparently this was considered as making on sound less Irish.. Toward the middle of the 18th century the Penal Laws were slowly cancelled and gradually the use of the prefixes began to reappear
By this time, of course, the Irish had be denied education for a number of years under the Penal Laws so illiteracy was wide spread; thus various spellings of the same name became common ( even the parish priests had a bit of a spelling problam - I have found records of my family in the Parish of Nenagh where records of brother and sister reflected different spellings for parental names and sibling names )
Then came the problem of translating Irish names into English. Governmental people who did this did so on a sounds like basis; therefore several different spellings of the same name appeared.
Then can the spelling of choice; wherein one adopted the spelling or use they wanted For example in my own family line, in the early part of the 18th century we had one brother using O'Meara and one using Meara.
At the time my forefathers came to this country they were using the Meara spelling. Apparently the large chage back to the perfix O came in the last half of the 19th century. In my family case my great grandfather "reattached" the O while he was serving in the Union Army during the Civil War