Two Fitzpatrick families and the survival of an agricultural tradition in nineteenth-century Ireland By the middle of the nineteenth century, the countryside around Pettigo and Drumkeeran in southwestern Fermanagh was divided among farms, grazing holdings and the estates of families…
A Familiar Name in Virginia In the previous post, I followed William Fitzpatrick from his appearance in colonial Virginia in 1738 back toward a possible homeland in the Pettigo–Drumkeeran district of northwestern Ireland. The investigation brought together William’s Y-DNA, his…
One of the central goals of this project has always been to connect modern Fitzpatrick paternal lines, wherever the evidence allows it, with the historical Ó Maol Phádraig families found in the Irish record. That is a much harder task…
One of the most difficult parts of working forward into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that the surname Fitzpatrick begins to conceal rather than clarify family origins. By this point, people descended from different Gaelic Pátraic families could all…