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In another thread, I mentioned that the National Library of Ireland has put online a huge number of parish registers of baptisms and marriages from the 19th century, and by now I've gone through hundreds of pages of them doing my genealogical research. In doing that, I've has a Eureka moment about names in Ireland, and it may help to explain why so many "wrong" versions of names have arisen in modern times.
I've been searching in registers in Mayo, Offaly, Kilkenny, and Cork, so there's a fair sampling from different parts of Ireland, and after the obvious things I noticed about how surnames and townland names changed form over time, and how some priests struggled to deal with some names, it suddenly dawned on me (far later than it should have), that in those hundreds of pages (actually, nearly a thousand pages by now, since I'm still at it), traditional Irish names were almost completely missing.
There was not one single child, parent, spouse, sponsor, or witness to a baptism or marriage who bore any of a whole host of "traditional" Irish names, such as Aidan, Brian, Ciaran, Declan, or my own name, Kevin, whether in an Irish form or Anglicized, and the same was true for the female side, where there was not a single Aoife, Gobnait, Maeve, or Una, and in fact 95% or more of them had one of only about a dozen or so female names, with Brigid/Bridget being the only one that was traditionally Irish (but by then also common in many other places).
In the areas where I was searching, nearly everyone would have been Irish-speaking at the time (except in Kilkenny towards the end of the century), so of course a number of the James's, Johns, Michaels, Patricks, Annes, Marys, and Margarets who were there were probably called by the Irish versions of their names at home, but nearly every single name was one which could easily have been borne by someone in England at the time.
There must have come a point, perhaps near to or after the founding of the Free State, when awareness of older names revived and people started using them again, and the lack of familiarity with some of them may have led to altered versions being adopted at times, especially in the Anglicized forms. What really astounded me, though, was that the choices in naming of children in the 19th century seem to reflect the way people were in the process of being shamed into rejecting their own culture and language.
_________________ I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.
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