In this article, we look at Irish Surnames – their origins and evolution. See if you can find the Irish surnames in your family tree in one of the sections below.

Letter from Ireland magazine cover, Galway tribes banners

Letter from Ireland Magazine (September/October, 2019)

Welcome to the Letter from Ireland Magazine for March/April, 2019. In this issue you will find features on: Saint Patrick and following in his footsteps, County Mayo – a Homelands feature, using Irish Records for your Irish ancestry research and much more.

From the High King of Ireland to South Australia

If we go back in time in Ireland – all the way back to about 1,000 years ago – we come to a period when the island of Ireland was occupied by a number of Gaelic “tribes”. These tribes occupied specific areas and their boundaries shifted backwards and forwards as the power of one tribe…

Landscape in Connemara in Galway County, Ireland

The Last Resident of an Irish Island

The island of Omey lies off the coast of Connemara – an area to the west of Ireland that covers parts of Counties Mayo and Galway in the province of Connaught. This was the region that Cromwell referred to in the 1600s when he “invited” leading Gaelic families to leave more fertile areas of the…

The Stone Circles and Druids of Ireland

Have you heard of the Druids of Ireland? Long before Christianity reached Ireland’s shores, there was a complex culture of beliefs involving the practices of law, medicine, and the oral tradition. In this letter we discuss the Druids, the ancient intellectual class of ancient Ireland.