Family names from the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman and Scotch
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Release date is 2025-11-13
Brian Coe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was created from images of public domain material made available by the University of Toronto Libraries.) Brian Coe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was created from images of public domain material made available by the University of Toronto Libraries.)
"Family names from the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman and Scotch" by Thomas G. Gentry is an etymological and onomastic reference work written in the late 19th century. It explores the origins and meanings of surnames from these traditions, pairing brief historical sketches and language lessons with alphabetized glossaries of names. The focus is on how history, phonetics, and grammar shape surname forms and senses, making it useful to readers interested in ancestry and the linguistic roots of family names.
The opening of the work lays out a preface that explains why names matter, surveys earlier scholarship (strong on Hebrew and Greek, weaker on Latin and English lists), notes the particular difficulty of Celtic names, and states the author’s aim to provide reliable, primary-sourced derivations while acknowledging limits. A contents page signals a structure that repeats for each tradition: history, language notes, and derivations. The Irish section begins with a concise history of the Celts within the Indo-European family, the spread into western Europe and Britain, Roman contact, and the persistence of Celtic elements in place‑names and common words; it notes modern survivals in Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, and Manx. This is followed by “Lessons in Irish,” a practical primer on the alphabet, vowel and consonant sounds, aspiration, diphthongs/triphthongs, word endings, and regional pronunciations, and then by an extensive A–Y list of Irish-derived surnames with compact etymologies. The excerpt closes as the Anglo-Saxon part begins, emphasizing the centrality of Anglo-Saxon to English vocabulary and introducing the historical arrival of the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles. (This is an automatically generated summary.)