rench rigins?

One of the most common questions posed by most people looking into the Delahunty name is "Are we French or Irish?" Whilst looking through some internet Delahunty message boards, I came across the article below by a certain Larry Jones. Larry is a 30 year researcher into the Delahunty name, and is the author of Delanty Ancestry (1976). He has kindly allowed me to reproduce his posting here. Enjoy...

Why Delahunty, Delanty, Dulchanty, et al., are not French.

A French origin is very commonly asserted by and for persons whose last names are Delahanty, Dullanty, Delanty, Dillahunty, Delahunty, etc. My wife's Delanty family in Washington state, USA, was among those asserting it. Nevertheless, the odds for a French origin are slim to none, as I argued in Delanty Ancestry (1976).

The Name Itself:

The Irish name, whether spelled Dulchanty, Delahunty, or Delanty, or any other variant, originally described any member of a sept from central Ireland in an area overlapping the counties of Tipperary and Offaly. A sept is an extended grouping of persons claiming a common origin like a Scottish clan, but looser in structure. It is an old Gaelic name spelled Ó’Dulchaointigh, according to experts. (The name means "singer of sad songs" - have you heard any Irish ballads?) The fact that the sound of the letter H may be present or absent in the middle of the names shared by descendants is explained by the fact that the sound represented is a guttural sound, like the ch sound in "ach, du lieber Augustin" in German. So, when the sound in "Ó’Dulchaointigh" came to be spelled in English, the listener wrote down one of three variants - H or CH or nothing at all, as in Dulanty.

Appearances May be Deceiving:

It is a commonplace among scholars of names that there are many family names that "sound like" or "look like" they belong to another ethnic or national group than they really do. Of course, an erroneous inference depends upon the expectations of the listener. In the US, at least, Delahanty or Delanty is one of those names that is wrongly attributed. In this case, the error is thinking that it is French.

One abbreviated list of a few Irish surnames that seem foreign but are rarely if ever found outside Ireland is given in Edward MacLysaght’s masterpiece Irish Families, 1972. The most prominent is Coen or Cowan, frequently assumed to be the Jewish Cohen. The Irish names he lists that are most similar to ours in looking like aristocratic French names (by using "de la ...") are Delacour, Delargy, and De Yermond.

In addition, many of our ancestors, if not all, were not well educated and did not spell as we do. In fact, spelling of many names did not become standardized even among the elite until as late as1800, so our 19th century ancestors typically did not know if their name should be spelled "de la Hunty" or "Delahunty." They did, however, know that in America Frenchmen had high social status from the time of Lafayette onwards. They also knew that the Irish were despised – after all, most Irish immigrants came to the US in the Hungry Forties (the 1840s) willing to take any menial job rather than starve to death at home, where they were still members of a British colony, unlike native Americans. No one wanted to be Irish in the 19th century – a fact that probably led to a reaction by later Irish Americans, so that St. Patrick’s Day is the most prominent white ethnic holiday in the whole year in the US today, and has been for decades.

One Sample Case:

In accounts written in the 1930s, my wife’s Delanty family traced its origin through Maine, to Nova Scotia, and back to Waterford, Ireland. Before that they claimed to have been a Huguenot family that emigrated to Ireland from France. (The Huguenots were Protestants, another higher status claim in the 19th and early 20th century than being Catholic. My wife’s family had been Catholic in Maine, but later married Protestant.) The records of the family in Orono, Maine, and earlier in Newfoundland, show marriages and burials indicating a solidly Irish Catholic origin, with no hint of French or Protestant origins.

Nevertheless, our family’s ancestor William Delanty had a brother Richard, whose name had been Delanty in Maine, who married in Washington Territory, and whose wife is credited with changing the spelling to a capital L. So the Richard who had been Delanty in Maine, became a DeLanty in Washington state. Later his family moved to Arizona. His descendants today in southern California are DeLantys. This is only one case where the family shifted the spelling from being Irish to being French.

Another Case:

Over the past 30 years I have had contact with another branch of the Delanty sept centered in Iowa. I recently made email contact with some in the branch further west, who had taken to spelling the name with a capital L. They knew that earlier the family had not capitalized the L and that it had been changed. Again, they became “French” – in this case in the 20th century.

Migration Went Both Ways:

Complicating matters for the genealogist, in the late 1600s wars of religion, or at least wars dressed in religious clothing, caused some French to flee to Ireland and some Irish to flee to France.

Wild Geese:

In Ireland in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, the forces of Catholic King James II, Jacobites and the French were defeated by William of Orange. Prominent and not-so-prominent Irishmen fled to the Continent, including France; they were called the Wild Geese. (Thus, although Hennessy is an Irish family name, it is appears most prominently as a French cognac. It was produced by an Irish family that was part of the Wild Geese, I think.)

Huguenots:

In 1685 the French King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed tolerance to the minority French Protestants. Large numbers of immigrants fled to Protestant countries (including Ireland, which was under the rule of the Protestant English monarchy). The Huguenot colony at Portarlington, Ireland, was where most lived in Ireland.

The Long Shot: Possible French Origins:

In speaking of whether Delahunty is French, of course, we are talking of the origins of family names. Naturally, there may today be Delantys in France. But a Google search of the Internet in 2002 did not reveal a single reference to a Delanty or Delahunty in any site located in France, that is, using .fr as the final domain name. There are some Lantys, as we would suspect from the evidence outlined below. The question is, did the Delahunty or Delanty name originate there or did at least some of those with name originate there? I say that it is extremely unlikely that anyone today has such a name from a family that originated in France.

This is an account of the work that I surveyed in reaching my conclusion in my 1976 Delanty Ancestry. I looked at Huguenot records available to me at the Newberry Library in Chicago and at the University of Chicago. They included records from the Netherlands, England and Ireland. In none of them did I find a Delanty, Dullanty, Delahunty, etc. The closest that I could come was the D’Aulnis de la Lande family, some of whom settled at Portarlington, Ireland. The most valuable works that I searched were Le Second Ordre, Societe du Grand Armorial de France, Paris, 1947; Le Chesnaye de Boi, Dictionnaire de la Noblesse, vol. 7, Paris, 1867; Thomas P. LeFanu and W. H. Manchee, Dublin and Portarlington Veterans. King William II’s Huguenot Army, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, no. XLI, London, 1946; Grace Lee, Huguenot Settlements in Ireland, London, 1936; Thomas P. LeFanu, Registers of the French Church of Portarlington, Ireland, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, no. XIX, London, 1908; and Charles Lart Huguenot Pedigrees, vol. 2, London, 1928.

According to Thomas Gimlette, History of the Huguenot Settlers in Ireland and Other Literary Remains, Dunmore East, England, 1888, there was also a Dr. Peter DeRante at Waterford, who of course should be of particular interest to my family, because they said they came from Waterford. I can find no connection.

Fans of French Catholic origins should note that there are several families named “de Lanty” which have held armorial bearings. Jongler de Mirenas. Grand Armorial de France. There is even a town “Lanty” from which these families all apparently originally hail. It is in the department of Nievre, 46 degrees, 48 minutes, north latitude and 3 degrees and 50 minutes east longitude. Dictionnaire Etymologique Des Noms de Familie et Prenoms de France, Larousse, Paris, 1951. Those who wish to pursue this line of research should examine Georges (comte d.) Soultrait Armorial de l’ancien duche de Nivernais, Paris, 1847. Internet searches for a Lanty today will find a number of Frenchmen, the most prominent apparently an apologist for Stalin.

Conclusion:

As much as it might be enjoyable to pick up an additional nation and the gift of its heritage as an inheritance, it does not seem that the Delahanty, Dolhanty, etc., family can be creditably thought French. Occam’s razor is the phrase that logicians have used for centuries to mean that the argument with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred. Because there is an Irish family obviously there as an origin, every such person must be assumed Irish, until proven otherwise. I have never yet seen any evidence that any Delahanty, Dillahunty, Dulchanty, etc. was ever French.

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