Daly Project

[DanDaly]

Any other Daly Project members on here?

Warrior or Poet?

The knick-knack sellers and online encyclopedias seem to have have our surname appear in the middle ages as a line only represented in the ranks of the Poets. A few minutes spent on GOOGLE produces a rather extensive list of fellow Daly practitioners of the Art of War within the ranks of the Brotherhood of Warriors. Our name has been well represented at senior ranks and in important assignments throughout the modern history of warfare in the Army, Navy and Airforce elements of Ireland, the countries making up the British Commonwealth and the USA.

As an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Daly

"In World War I, Daly became further cemented into Marine Corps lore when he is said to have yelled, "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" to his company before charging the Germans at the Battle of Belleau Wood.

Daly is among the most decorated U.S. Marines in history, and over a thirty year career and saw action all the major Marine Corps campaigns from 1900 to the end of World War I. He earned his first Medal of Honor during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and the second in Haiti in 1915. Butler described Daly as "the fightingest Marine I ever knew...It was an object lesson to have served with him"

My own service of a little shy of 42 years in the Canadian Armed Forces did not much encourage a study of the Poets. Any Poets out there to represent the modern Daly family in that pursuit?

[ChrisMcLain132906]

Interesting you brought that up, Dan. I've found that in what we could call the crosscurrents of gaelic society, there was a great intermingling, intermarriage, or bonds of kinship one way or another among the professional classes that could have played a role in one's profession regardless of what profession his father had. The gaelic professional classes were service-kindreds, or lucht-tighe (people of the household) in every lord's mensal lands around his royal residence. Each lord had a varying amount of service kindreds, which were clerics, brehons, bards, harpers, kern, physicians, smiths, carpenters, houndskeepers, harpers, galloglass constables etc, all who held a portion of the lord's mensal lands in hereditary tenure free from exactions. Many lesser septs of gaelic nobility were coarbs or erenaghs in local abbeys that the lordship supported. Bardic families like the Ó Dálaigh were patronized by different gaelic lords at different periods of time (smaller tuaths did less patronizing, and on the other side of the coin, large tuaths and overkingdoms had a vast amount of lucht-tighe lands and service kindreds), which is how families like yours became so widespread at a time when the overwhelming majority of people were of the "unfree" classes of tenant farmers bound to the land under either a Gaelic lord or Anglo-Norman one. The few individuals of these families that actually held lands in a lordship were gentlemen farmers with tenants, and produced a portion of the food for the lord's household (as this is the meaning of "mensal" lands). However the rest of the kin-group practiced the family's profession or had transitioned to farming as husbandmen/yeomen or tenants/farm labourers to some degree or another.

I had previously thought that when gaelic society ended, many of these people were thrust into other occupations that were the most utilitarian or in-demand in the economic conditions of the time. However after going through so many 16th century Elizabethan Fiants, it seems there was an ebb and flow of profession-changes within this social class. I've found medical families listed as kerns and smiths, galloglass families as kerns and carpenters, bardic families as musicians, clerical families as smiths or shoemakers, and ecclesiastical families in various professions. In the early 17th century through the Cromwellian confiscations, many of the dispossessed gentry of the professional classes entered various professions, some in the historical context of their hereditary occupations and some not. Some of leading people of these septs and families raised and commanded (or were at least officers in) companies of infantry or horse in the various rebellions and wars of the 17th c, many ending up as officers of the "Wild Geese" abroad on the continent. So although your Ó Dálaigh family was historically a bardic one since the 12th century (they had their own school in Meath), their proclivity to military service in many different kin-groups may have gone back much longer than you may think. My current research is indicating my family were physicians who at some point had become blacksmiths and glaziers. You could probably say that the larger Ó Dálaigh surname distributed as it did as bards and towards the end of gaelic Ireland began to transition into other professions. Whatever part of Ireland your research has lead you to, examining the most dense part of your Ó Dálaigh farming cluster and then researching the geography there and what lordship it was in, may reveal a lucht-tighe population with Ó Dálaighs in the Elizabethan Fiants.

[DanDaly]

Thanks Chris!
Great points and advice. This is the direction I am working towards. To all the wars add in the records of significant weather events, crop failures and other natural disasters. No wonder some families were lost completely.

My 2x ggf was supposedly a weaver born in Co Cork about 1807. Joseph Daly and family left for New York in 1842, but a Ship's Fever outbreak took them through Grosse Île and landed them at Quebec City to start a new life. By 1845 they were in the bush farming on un-surveyed lands up the Gatineau River valley here in Western Quebec, Canada. Not having much luck locating any records tying the family to a specific location in Co Cork. The family may have only moved there that generation at some point before Joseph's birth. A bit of a secretive line with a lack of testers and those that might be promising do not know their history nor have a family Tree posted.

A family legend of siblings on the same boat coming over, but not proven yet by DNA or Grosse Île records of the dead. The local authorities were completely overwhelmed by the numbers arriving on the coffin ships. They did there best to take care of the sick and dying, but I do not believe there was an effective and centralized recording of those that died at sea before even reaching Grosse Île. Pre-Confederation here in Canada meant there were no immigration controls for movement within the United Kingdom.

Running into much the same situation with Mom's Murphy in Co Mayo. There a landlord had cottages torn down and forced his people off the land to raise cattle. Finding relatives spread to the four winds, but no documentation of the clearance event around 1840. Our family was here in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada and on a farm by 1845.

Have grown my Family Tree to over 430K names trying to triangulated family connections and locations. Have found lots of cousins, but not much luck with direct ancestors on either side. With common family names it has been hard to search records associated to townlands without knowing where the families were.

Dan