De-Anglicisation of Names

[slohairt]

Before I decide to stop posting on this thread, I wish to reiterate something: The point of this thread was to provide the etymology of anglicised names of Gaelic origin.

British origin? What exactly is that? Technically speaking, there are no British people (unless you consider the ancient Britons). As a citizen of the sovereign Irish Republic (and given its turbulent history), I find your insinuation and equation of British and Irish to be borderline offensive. I can assure you, my other 4 000 000 countrymen would agree. Irish is as different to English as Russian to Italian.

Concerning Bill's post, you seem to conveniently forget that he stated his Holland ancestors came from Ireland. Why would you then suggest that his ancestors came from the English midlands? That makes little to no sense. There exists the slim possibility that they were English "planters" but the odds are against that. What he asked were the Irish origins of the name Holland, not the prevalence of an English surname of the same spelling!

As I stated before (and apparently must state again) in a previous post, I am simply informing people of the original Gaelic spelling of their name if one exists. For example, if your name is Smith, and you are descended from people from Ireland, there is a strong chance that your name is translated from Mac Gabhann. Is it possible it is from the English Smith? Possibly, but probably not.

If a Gaelic origin does not exist for a poster's name, I simply provide a transliteration or translation for amusement's sake. Nothing more. I am not trying to track down peoples ancestors. It would take more than your humble scribe and/or an English county search engine.

After writing this, I have changed my mind. All of this talk of ire(land) has indeed got my ire up. I undertook this thread for amusement and it is now far from amusing. I do not need to be insulted and refuted at every corner, so I will simply stop posting here.

Tá brón orm, mo charaí.

[gilmore]

Before I decide to stop posting on this thread, I wish to reiterate something: The point of this thread was to provide the etymology of anglicised names of Gaelic origin.

British origin? What exactly is that? Technically speaking, there are no British people (unless you consider the ancient Britons). As a citizen of the sovereign Irish Republic (and given its turbulent history), I find your insinuation and equation of British and Irish to be borderline offensive. I can assure you, my other 4 000 000 countrymen would agree. Irish is as different to English as Russian to Italian.

Concerning Bill's post, you seem to conveniently forget that he stated his Holland ancestors came from Ireland. Why would you then suggest that his ancestors came from the English midlands? That makes little to no sense. There exists the slim possibility that they were English "planters" but the odds are against that. What he asked were the Irish origins of the name Holland, not the prevalence of an English surname of the same spelling!

As I stated before (and apparently must state again) in a previous post, I am simply informing people of the original Gaelic spelling of their name if one exists. For example, if your name is Smith, and you are descended from people from Ireland, there is a strong chance that your name is translated from Mac Gabhann. Is it possible it is from the English Smith? Possibly, but probably not.

If a Gaelic origin does not exist for a poster's name, I simply provide a transliteration or translation for amusement's sake. Nothing more. I am not trying to track down peoples ancestors. It would take more than your humble scribe and/or an English county search engine.

After writing this, I have changed my mind. All of this talk of ire(land) has indeed got my ire up. I undertook this thread for amusement and it is now far from amusing. I do not need to be insulted and refuted at every corner, so I will simply stop posting here.

Tá brón orm, mo charaí.

I am sorry you allowed yourself to get worked up into a snit and decided to take your transliterations and translatoins and go home, but I stand by everything I said, with one possible exception.

If one is going to post in a forum such as this, one must expect inaccurate or misleading information to be corrected or added to, and i don't apologize for doing so.

As to the Boyers, I am a Boyer descendant, and my relatives and I have been researching this family for decades. I can provide authoritative sources for everything I said about it.

As to the Hollands, (and BTW it was Bill's wife, not Bill, who was said to be of Irish ancestry) my post did not refer to him at all, necessarily, if you will read it carefully, but to persons named Holland of Bristish ancestry. Perhaps I should have said "persons who ancestors came from the British Isles," since that includes " Great Britain, Ireland, & adjacent islands," according to Merriam-Webster. If you are unhappy with their inclusion of Ireland, I suggest you take that up with them.

I fee that it is important to point out that, despite your caveat that you were merely transliterating and translating names into Gaelic, some people, especially Americans, do not read it to mean that, but rather read it to mean that their surname, and hence their patrilineal ancestry, is indubitably of Gaelic origin, or has some familial, genetic, genealogical, biological or at least etymological connection to a Gaelic surname.

In fact this has happened here.

Being Irish and living in Canada, perhaps you are not aware that most Americans do not know who their great grandparents were and would be hard pressed to give all four of their grandparents' surnames. Instead, we decide who our forebears were based on our ever-changing momentary enthusiasms and dislikes, and perhaps because we are too lazy to do the genealogical research needed for certainty.

We are a Society for Creative Ethnicity.

For example, these days many more Americans say that they are of Irish descent than is mathematically possible. Of course in the 19th Century, public opinion was quite different, Irish immigrants were held in much lower esteem than today, and Americans who were indeed of Irish heritage often denied it and made up other ancestry for themselves.

It was similar for Italians in the 19th century, but after the "Godfather" movies of the 1970's, many Americans with no more claim to be Italian than to have a surname that ended with a vowel proudly proclaimed themselves sons of Italy.

Likewise, after the "Highlander" and "Braveheart" movies of the 90's a vogue for being of Scottish descent arose, although I hear it is on the wane.

I do not say that you were intentionally misleading people at all, but I do say that people are being mislead---often by themselves---into thinking that their ancestry is something other than what it is.