TO: Mc(I)(N)erneys
FR: Peter Mac An Erenagh, PhD
14JA00
Thanks for the info. Thanks especailly to:
Jan McNerney (wife of Dr. Michael from UT) ... in Washington doing some research at the Archives.
Jan, do you plan a book? Let's.
My background: I'm a professional writer, PhD in English (Johns Hopkins, 1977) and taught at U of Pennsylvania (first university in US, Ben Franklin founded it in 1749). I taught at UP 1976-80; got WHAMmed: (I was [and remain] a White Heterosexual American Male). I do hack work now, for computer organizations; it pays well.
Bottom line: I have a profound interest in using whatever skills and judgment I may have developed, and offer hereby, to help us sort out ourselves. And I'm interested in deploying my book-making skills on a book about our family.
Let's begin with our family's name, in all its variants.
Most bottom line: let's get the name straight.
What follows is concept. Not content. Not procedure. My effort to psychedelicize (expand consciousness).
But, may I presume to suggest? Let's develop and establish and write down a high level view. (I borrow the methodology of systems engineering, a domain a document). From it, all modules, or members, may flow.
Thus: The Ur - question: Have you, Jan, any info about the origin, etymology, history of the surname?
Perhaps I do. What follows is: imagination, inflamed by memory.
Go back (via documents and racial memory) to the sixteenth century. Find yourself, especially, in the central west coastal kingdoms of Clare (& Limerick?). Poor. Rural. Devasted by centuries of war. Hideous dark, wet weather. Not much food. Or any: rate of infant deaths high.
You are struggling to live there. But anytime now: an armored human hulk may appear, off a boat, savage, drunk, and hungry. He's at the low door of your rock hovel. He bears axes. Big, wide-bladed axes. Axes forged and honed, and he's trained to use to hack off legs -- both at once. First, a blow to the groin, across the torso. Then the head. Two chops. One low. One, decapitation.
The hulk roars triumph in an indecipherable tongue. Behind, at your back, the peat fire warms against the cold wet. In front, a-colding, your proud, upright, moments-ago-alive husband? He lies delegged, beheaded, bedraggled, dead. Dead. Dead in a pool of his blood, soon your blood, always our blood.
The metalled man's drunk. He's hungry. Your babes squall, warm beneath the hides. You shriek. He's hungry for your babes' meat. Then you.
That may be how it happened.
Centuries pass. You swirl, a ghost in the whuirlwind.
Not much paper or ink or sylii (pens) or many palimpsests, except at
the monasteries, and there precious little. And what little there is, persists
there, cached, despite raids and oppressions for centuries. The raids?
Conducted by Scandanavians who show up today, generations on, as those
massively-muscled so-called "Black Irish" (I guess; I've heard the term
from a man named Doyle, massively-muscled (from weight-lifting), a Harvard
PhD (he translated, from Latin, an Irish monk's diary, big deal) : point
is: he was a product of Viking rapists and murderers).
Now come ahead, to thereafter: to the 1607 Battle of the Boyne (check
me on these milestones), and then Cromwell: meaning, destruction of the
culture's artifacts, its records, and the people who knew who and what
and where they were. Like what Pol Pot and the K'hmer Rouge did in Laos.
Kill the (self-) literate classes. Consume what you could eat, then destroy
all. Then move on. One casualty: the naming system, which depended on records
for identification and transmission. Thus: we have corrupted surnames.
Now think of what was done in the seventeenth century, and has been done since, to the names of "Indians" here. And to the names of Africans slaves here (their plantation owners generated Ciceros and Hectors [drawn from their smatterings of Latin & Greek]). Those names used to appear among African American athletes we started seeing on TV, such as Cassius Clay, later Mohammed Ali. Clay, I believe, a "Planter" surname. That most important athlete -- worldwide -- of the century just past did, of course, cast off the slave name.
Shall we? Shall we cast off the corruption?
Technical:
I spell it Mc I -- you don't. A case of the I being dropped in the ocean? (I'll explain that if you don't know).
John McNerney's escutcheon is different from ours: we are not "Brandy" McNerneys -- we stayed on the Clare side of the Shannon, I presume.
I believe the best way to orthographize (spell & write) my version of the surname is:
Mac An Erenaugh
That's an improved version of the (for most non-initiates) hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-spell, McInerney, or McNerney -- whatever -- no wonder Irish in America acquired the racist sobriquet "Mick."
Am I incorrect?
I think Mc is an abbreviation of Mac (son of) -- the omission of the "a" probably something done by post-Boyne British bureaucrats as an abbreviation (everyone in the seventeenth century and forward would understand) to save ink and paper and time (and also to reduce and subjugate). Something institutionalized by the British after Battle of the Boyne. Probably a whole book could be written about the phenomenon.
Any views?
Incidentally: I bought a wonderful sort of Payne Stewart sweater at a consignment shop in Denver: the label shows:
J. McInerney, Inc.
Hawick, Scotland
Hawick is in "The Borders," the southernmost region of Scotland (lots of fighting with the blue-painted Angles there). And Hawick is the center of the fine wool growing/knitting industry. The sweater is really very high quality -- great feel & fit and colors. Even has delicate hummingbirds on one sleeve.
I checked: a net correspondent searched and found no such business. I'll keep looking.
Finally: when one checks an Ireland website (and I should include it, but am too multitasked to do so), one finds excerpts from a book about County Clare towns and natural features and history written by one Sean Spellissy, titled Clare.... Know of it? Have it? May I rent/buy it? Amazon.com doesn't have it.
Last: Good idea to check US domestic records to find evidences of arrival/ life in US. How about, though, checking Ireland records to find evidences of life/ departure?
John McNerney: You seem to have time on his hands: how 'bout it?
Peter Mac An Ereney, PhD
Note: I have understood for some time that McInerney (and hence McNerney), is the British/ American version of::
Mac An Erenagh
where Mac = son
where An = (of) the
where Erenagh = steward
Summa: son of the steward (of church lands). An hereditary office/ title. The steward (I believe) managed the secular affairs of the church in a hamlet/ village/ town.
Views?
Jan, I hope the foregoing focuses attention on the surname. On the source. John, take note. As advised:
There's an active duty USS frigate named McInerney: