40 American Surnames That Are Irish in Translation, Not Spelling. If there is no O and no Mac anywhere in your family tree, you have probably decided there is no Irish in you. That is exactly what an Irish family looks like after somebody translated it. Not misspelled it — translated it. Mac Gabhann means son of the smith, so that family went down on paper as Smith. Mac Conchoille means son of the hound of the wood, so they went down as Woods. Forty American surnames that look completely English and are Irish underneath, with the Gaelic original for every one.


CHAPTERS
00:00 No O, no Mac — and still Irish
01:02 The trades: Smith, Clarke, Ward, Carpenter
01:27 Who Patrick Woulfe was, and why this is his list
03:42 The animals: Fox, Salmon, Rabbitt, Barnacle
04:45 The name Woulfe called "ridiculously translated"
05:24 The colors: Black, White, Green, Gray
06:57 The land and the water: Woods, Rock, Waters
07:38 Ford — how an expert swimmer became a river crossing
08:16 The eight translations that are simply wrong
10:13 All forty names
10:29 One English surname, several unrelated Irish families
12:49 Why it happened, and who was holding the pen
13:51 How your county decided your English name
14:46 Walsh means "the Welshman"
15:17 The names that ran the other way
16:17 What a surname can and cannot prove
18:08 The Mac and Mc myth, and the O' myth
19:02 The records that actually move you forward


WHAT THIS VIDEO COVERS
Irish surname origins and meanings, Gaelic surnames translated into English, Irish names in America, anglicized Irish surnames, Irish American genealogy and family history research.

Everyone knows the spelling story — O Suilleabhain became Sullivan, Mac Carthaigh became McCarthy, the O and the Mac got knocked off at the courthouse. This is the other half, and almost nobody knows it. A great many Irish families did not have their names respelled. They had them translated. Somebody worked out roughly what the Gaelic word meant and wrote the English word instead, which left the family carrying an ordinary English surname with no Irish letters in it anywhere.

The source is Patrick Woulfe's 1923 dictionary of Irish surnames, still the standard authority. And the detail that changes everything: Woulfe put the word "translation" in quotation marks almost every time he used it. He did not think most of these were translations. He thought they were guesses by clerks who did not speak Irish. Across his entries he calls them erroneous, supposed, attempted and incorrect — and once, ridiculous.

Mac Conraoi became King because somebody thought he saw the Irish word for king inside it. Mac Conshnamha meant the expert swimmer and became Ford because somebody misheard it as the word for a river crossing. O hEachdhubhain contains the words for horse and black, and was translated as Whitesteed.


DISCLAIMER:
Every pairing here comes from Woulfe's dictionary, not from commercial surname sites, which invent etymologies freely. Pairs that circulate widely but do not survive checking were left out.

And the video is straight with you about the limits. Most of these names have other and much larger origins — Smith is the most common surname in America and most American Smiths are English; Fox has at least six separate Gaelic sources plus an Anglo-Norman one, an English one and a German one. Woulfe gives almost no numbers, so anybody quoting you a figure for how many American Smiths are really Mac Gabhann has invented it. A surname tells you where to start looking. Proof is a documented line back to a named parish and townland.


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