There was fierce debate between O'Malley genealogists in the late 1800s and early 1900s regarding how certain ancestral lines of the wider O'Malley clan connected to the ancient "royal" line of the chieftains. Brendan O'Malley (former Clan Chieftain & my fellow DNA Project Administrator) has been exploring the correspondence that was exchanged back and forth between the intrepid genealogists of the day, and reports on some of his findings in the article below.
Maurice Gleeson
February 2023
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Puzzle in the O’Malley Family Tree
by Brendan O’MalleyThe Project
The Finding Grace project seeks to identify the genetic signature of Grace O’Malley, the famous pirate queen, so that present day O’Malleys and possible descendants of her O’Flaherty and Bourke husbands can use DNA testing to establish how closely they may be related to her. The first phase of the project has been to study the historical record in order to trace possible modern day descendants of her immediate O’Malley ancestors. See the accompanying family tree diagram to see the relationships between the individuals named in this article.Grace O’Malley
We know that Grace was born around 1530, the only daughter of the Chieftain of the O’Malley clan, Owen Dubhdara O’Malley. At that time, the O’Malleys ruled over the Barony of Murrisk, or Umhall Uachtarach, including the lands on the south and east side of Clew Bay in Co. Mayo, as well as the islands large and small that are such a feature of the area.Grace’s life and achievements, as well as the details of her immediate family are well documented in Anne Chambers’ definitive biography, based on extensive research in the English state papers. These archives include Grace’s correspondence with Lord Burghley ahead of her visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth 1st at Greenwich in 1593.
In Ireland, the oldest written records are the Annals, which record significant events affecting the great landholding families, including battles, marriages, deaths and genealogies of chieftains. Many of these genealogies reach back over 2,000 years, but prior to 600 AD, they are generally regarded by academic scholars as unreliable. Genealogies were well preserved in the oral tradition, as they were very important in determining who had the right to occupy which pieces of land and who had to pay what tribute (usually in the form of livestock or grain) to whom as a result. These oral histories were often written down for the first time many years or centuries later. There are several events recorded in the Annals relating to O’Malleys, Lords of Umhall.
From these various sources, we can determine with some certainty that Grace was the daughter of Owen Dubhdara, son of Cormac (who died in 1523), son of Owen (killed in a raid on Killybegs in 1513), son of Dermot, probably born in the early 1400s. For the purposes of the project, we decided to start by looking for possible male O’Malley descendants of Dermot who would be willing to take a Y-DNA test. Any similarities in these tests could then help us to verify or correct the historical record and zero in on Dermot’s Y-DNA signature. Y-DNA is only present in men and, like surname, is passed down from father to son with very little variation from generation to generation. It is these small variations that provide the genetic markers we are looking for.
The Records
To follow the lines of descent from Dermot, we looked at the work done by other genealogical scholars. These scholars researched the annals and later records relating to ownership of land, as the English regime gradually spread into Connacht and the chieftains either submitted and held on to their lands, or were replaced and some or all of their lands passed to others.- In 1832, Sir Samuel O’Malley of Rose Hill in Co Mayo, commissioned the Chief Herald of Ireland, Sir William Betham, to produce a pedigree for him. It is a beautifully produced leatherbound book, which today is in the library of the University of Galway.
- In the early 1900s, Dr Austin O’Malley of Philadelphia investigated the family history and in 1913 produced a short history of the clan plus a list (very much in the style of the annals) of O’Malley-related events from the year 190 up to 1913. There is a copy in the National Library of Ireland.
- Major Harold O’Malley and his brother Captain Tyrrell O’Malley, sons of Middleton Moore O’Malley of Ross House, near Newport in Co Mayo, inherited the Betham pedigree and other papers. In the 1940s, they engaged with the Genealogical Office to have corrections made to Betham’s pedigree, seeking to bring it more in line with Dr Austin’s version. Their correspondence is in the library of the University of Galway.
- Prof Conor O’Malley of Galway was another who researched the O’Malleys and who commissioned a coat of arms from the Genealogical Office in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the O’Malley Clan Association.
- A little later, Sir Owen O’Malley on his retirement to Carrigahowley from the UK Foreign Office after the second World War, also conducted considerable research into the family. He published several papers through the Galway Historical and Archaeological Society and wrote a detailed manuscript on the Belclare branch of the O’Malleys. His papers are in the National Library in Dublin. He was also one of the founders of the O’Malley Clan Association.
Dr Austin, Harold, Tyrrell, Sir Owen and Prof Conor published articles, wrote to newspapers and corresponded with each other and with the Genealogical Office (successor to the Chief Herald’s office after 1943), frequently disagreeing with each other in fairly heated terms! An important issue for several of them was to establish which line of descent was “the Chieftain branch” and which were of lesser rank. This quest was of dubious significance given that the chieftainship of Irish clans passed on the death or dispossession of the Chieftain to his pre-selected second-in-command, the Tánaiste. This man was the strongest candidate of the wider family members (usually out to second cousins), and not necessarily the eldest son of the former chieftain. When the English system of primogeniture was forcibly introduced, it applied to titles conferred by the English crown and to the inheritance of land, but the old Irish chieftainships largely died out and Owen of Burrishoole (1650 – 1738) is generally considered to have been the last Gaelic chieftain of the O’Malleys.
There are several branches of the O’Malleys who claim descent from Dermot, although the details of their trees vary. The main areas of disagreement and uncertainty relate to the period from Grace’s time, in the late fifteenth century through to the late seventeenth century. Those two hundred years saw the transition from the old gaelic chieftains to the dominance of English law and the sovereignty of the English Crown. This transition led to numerous disputes over land between those with rights under the old system and those who embraced the new. Furthermore, in that period, there are multiple Owens, Edwards, Thomases and Teiges who seem to have been confused with each other in some cases, resulting in the attaching of some family lines to the wrong ancestor. This is becoming very clear thanks to DNA, which is helping to identify inconsistencies between the genetic family tree and the reported family trees.
Key Figures
Some key figures are of particular interest, as we can place reasonable levels of confidence in the records showing their descendants, even if there is less certainty about their own connections back to Dermot.- Captain Charles O’Malley (1635-1710)
- Captain Thomas O’Malley (No definite dates, but around the same time as the others)
- Owen O’Malley of Burrishoole (1650 – 1738)
- Eamonn an Saighdiur O’Malley (1644 – 1712)
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| Family Tree of the royal line of Grace O'Malley (click to enlarge)  |
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| The previous diagram in 3 sections (click to enlarge) |
By some accounts, he was also called Cormac Dubh (dark-haired Cormac), although there is no primary evidence to support the existence of a Cormac Dubh. He may or may not have been a son of Edmond of Cahernamart, son of Owen of Cahernamart (often referred to as the Great Chief), a great great grandson of Dermot, our starting point.
Charles is the ancestor of the Belclare line, including the O’Malleys of Hawthorn Lodge, of Prospect and of Snugborough, near Castlebar. Sir Owen O’Malley’s family and a branch descended from Charles Anthony O’Malley who emigrated to Canada in 1844 are also descended from him. Sir Owen and other family genealogists were very clear that this line descended from the Cahernamart Chieftains of the O’Malleys. Unfortunately, the direct male line appears to have died out in all of these lines of descent, so we cannot make use of DNA testing to establish just how Captain Charles and his descendants may have connected back to Dermot.
Captain Thomas O’Malley was born in the early 1600s, although we do not have definite dates for him. He was a Captain in Owen Roe O’Neill’s army, which fought in Ireland between 1642 and O’Neill’s death in 1649. He had a son, William of Caher, who in turn had a son, Teige of Achill. Teige married Mary MacSweeney of Rathmullen in Donegal. Their son Owen, born in 1695, held the family farm at Slievemore in Achill, where some of his descendants still live today, while others have been traced to Cleveland in the USA. Another son of Teige and Mary was Edmund, who married Martha Crump and had 4 sons. One of these sons, Edmund, had descendants who moved to Philadelphia, among whom was Dr Austin, whose researches referred to above have been the source of many versions of the family tree. We have found no living descendants of this Philadelphia line. Another son, Teige (born about 1725), was the father of Peter, a saddler who lived in Westport and was the father of Middleton Moore O’Malley of Ross House, several of whose descendants are alive today.
The various sources mentioned above agree that Captain Thomas’ father was called Edmond, but which Edmond was he? Dr Austin wrote that he was Edmond, chief of his name, who lived from 1579 – 1651 and that he in turn was the son of Melaghlin, Chieftain in 1576 and mentioned as such in the Composition of Mayo 1585. Controversially, Dr Austin further asserted that Melaghlin was a son of Owen Dubhdara and therefore a brother of Grace O’Malley. In correspondence in 1945 with Major Harold, Terrence Grey of the Genealogical Office, opined that Captain Thomas’ father Edmond was Edmond of Cahernamart (also 1579 – 1651!), the son of Owen of Cahernamart, known as the Great Chief, who had a well-documented dispute with Tibbot-na-Long Burke (Grace’s son) over land in 1602. Betham shows Edmond of Cahernamart as the son of Owen of Cahernamart, but says he had no children.
This Owen was mentioned in the Composition of Mayo 1585 as Owen of Cahernamart, Gentleman, and in an Inquisition of 1607 as Owen O’Malley of Cahernamart, Chief of his name. We don’t have an exact date for Melaghlin’s death, but it would seem that Owen succeeded him as Chieftain sometime between 1585 and 1607. Owen is shown in the Betham pedigree as the great-grandson of Donal O’Malley and his wife Bridget O’Neill of Tullyvanagh. Donal was the brother of Grace O’Malley’s ancestor Owen (another Owen!) O’Malley killed in Killybegs in 1513, and so a son of the Dermot who we have chosen as our starting point. Betham does not mention Melaghlin at all. Grey, however, suggests that Melaghlin was not the son of Owen Dubhdara but of his brother Dermot and so was Grace’s first cousin rather than her brother. Ann Chambers, Grace’s biographer is adamant that Grace had no full siblings and only one half-brother, Donal-na-Pioba.
So Captain Thomas may have been descended from Dermot via Melaghlin (according to Dr Austin, but unlikely), or via Owen of Cahernamart (according to Terrence Grey).
Owen of Burrishoole (1650 – 1738) was an important figure and is generally held to have been the last of the O’Malley Chieftains. According to Dr. Austin, he was an officer in the Jacobite army in 1689. In Betham’s pedigree, he is shown as having two sons, George and Patrick, but other accounts describe 4 more: James, Austin, Peter and Owen. It was the custom at the time and well into the nineteenth century that genealogies only included members of the established (Protestant) church. Catholic marriages were not recognised and any resulting children were seen as illegitimate, at least as far as inheritance was concerned. At Owen’s time, there was considerable pressure on landholders to convert to the established church and his sons George and Patrick certainly did so. George was the ancestor of Sir Samuel, first baronet O’Malley and Patrick’s grandson was Major-General George O’Malley of the British Army, who served under Wellington at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and later commanded the Connaught Rangers. George’s line died out, but the Ballyburke O’Malleys descend from Patrick and there are several of them alive today in Co Mayo and elsewhere.
Of the other 4 sons of Owen of Burrishoole, who remained Catholic, we have no record of Austin; James was the father of Seamus Bán, hanged as a rebel after the defeat of the French at the battle of Ballinamuck in 1798. The third son Owen’s grandsons Joseph and Austin were also on the losing side, but survived, with Austin emigrating to France to serve in Napoleon’s Irish legion where he married a French woman and his son Auguste-André O’Malley became a major-general in the French army. The fourth son Peter was the grandfather of the infamous Captain George the smuggler. Unfortunately, none of these direct male lines survive to today.
Owen of Burrishoole’s descent from Dermot, like the other key figures above, is not entirely certain. The Betham pedigree showed his father as Edmond Oge, son of Owen O’Malley of Lecanvey, while Dr Austin’s version has his father as Edmond Bacach (in Irish, Bacach means ‘lame’) of Clare Island, son of Owen O’Malley of Lecanvey. Both show Owen of Lecanvey’s father as Tully-na-Mart, great grandson of Tuathal of Kilgeever, son of Donal, and grandson of Dermot. This version would make Owen of Lecanvey a fourth cousin to Captain Thomas. Grey, however, suggests that Owen of Lecanvey might have been a son of Edmond of Cahernamart and therefore a brother of Captain Thomas.
Eamonn an Saighdiur O’Malley (1644 – 1712) is the ancestor of the Kilmilkin O’Malleys from the Maam valley in Co Galway. He was reputedly a soldier in Colonel John Browne’s regiment, raised in 1689 in support of King James II, and a descendant of Dermot, brother to Owen Dubhdara, Grace’s father. The pedigree of the Kilmilkin O’Malleys was featured in an article by Prof Conor O’Malley entitled ‘Memories of a Connemara Childhood’ and was also recorded in several family memoirs, notably based on the recollections of Bartley O’Malley (1844 – 1926) who was regarded as knowing all there was to know about the family history. Eamonn an Saighdiúr’s great grandson Sean na Fírinne (Truthful John) O’Malley (1740 – 1801) was Bartley’s great grandfather and has many descendants via his sons Tomás and Pádraig. Many of this family have had distinguished medical careers in Ireland and the USA.
Combining the historical record with Y-DNA tests
The O’Malley DNA project now includes tests on 303 people, of which 155 are men who have taken a Y-DNA test. They have been divided into groups with similar genetic patterns. The largest group - 46 in all, share a Mayo ancestry and have been called the Mayo group 3a. Five of these appear on historical family trees as descendants of Dermot (our chosen starting point) and have taken a Big Y test. A second group of 8 are the Kilmilkin O’Malleys, descendants of Sean na Fírinne, labelled group 3g and three of these have taken a Big Y test.Within the Mayo group 3a, DNA testing of two of the Ballyburke O’Malleys, descendants of Owen of Burrishoole, gives a common ancestor born in a timeframe centred on 1845, which fits very well with the William G O’Malley born in 1845 shown on their family tree.
The next oldest genetic marker that we have found in the Ballyburke line is FTC67000, which is shared with the Ross House O’Malleys, whose family tree shows them as descendants of Captain Thomas. The common ancestor who passed down DNA marker FT67000 to all his O’Malley descendants is estimated with 95% statistical confidence to have been born in a date range of 1451-1820, centred on the year 1669 AD. [3] This result implies a closer relationship between these two branches (Ballyburke and Ross House) than would be indicated by their family trees, even agreeing with Grey that Owen of Lecanvey was Captain Thomas’ brother. From a DNA perspective, Owen of Burrishoole (born in 1650) is the most likely candidate for a common ancestor of both lines. However, the range of possible dates for this common ancestor is wide, so does not definitely prove that the family trees are wrong.
Within Group 3g, DNA testing has come up with a definitive genetic signature for Sean na Fírinne. Unfortunately, this does not match the O’Malley men in Mayo Group 3a, which makes it clear that there was a DNA switch somewhere along Sean na Fírinne’s direct male line. So even though his descent from Dermot 1400 was accepted, the DNA switch makes this impossible to confirm.
The Results so far
One important point needs to be made. DNA testing can show how closely the people tested are related to each other. By testing sufficient numbers a genetic family tree can be built, showing genetic lines of descent. However, this process cannot tell who these common ancestors were. Only by combining the historical record with the DNA results can we hope to build an accurate picture.DNA testing so far has given us two genetic signatures that we can tie to specific ancestors with a high degree of confidence, namely FTC6857 being passed down by William G O’Malley of Ballyburke (1847-1925) and FTC36168 being passed down by Sean na Fírinne of Kilmilkin (1740-1801). In both cases, their family records indicate descent from Dermot 1400, our starting point, but, because of the DNA switch on the Kilmilkin line, this does not help us triangulate on the DNA signature of Dermot 1400.
We have also identified a number of earlier markers that are significant, even though we cannot as yet tie them to specific historical individuals. The DNA markers that appear to be closest in age to Dermot 1400 are FT86146 and its descendant branch FTA85293. The common ancestor who passed down DNA marker FT86146 to all his O’Malley descendants is estimated with 95% statistical confidence to have been born in a date range of 1064-1448 centred on the year 1278 AD. In the case of DNA marker FTA85293, the 95% confidence date range is 1148-1642, centred on 1434 AD. One of these markers may be the characteristic Y-DNA marker of Dermot 1400. [1,2]
Where we go from here
Only adding new results from other family members will help to narrow down the date ranges and establish at what historical point their lines merge. We have a number of potential candidates to test and continue to search for records of other people who by taking the Y-DNA test could add to our knowledge. Despite the dead ends that have arisen in several lines of descent, there are potentially many more, where the historical record is yet to be discovered. Who knows what old notebooks or legal papers are languishing in attics or old legal files? Perhaps some O’Malley sleuth will uncover a clue or two to help the project move forward.We also continue to look for funding to help pay for Big Y tests. Our GoFundMe page is at: https://gofund.me/a6fadccd and we have also received donations via the general fund at : https://www.familytreedna.com/group-general-fund-contribution.aspx?g=Maley
In the longer term, we plan to look at Grace’s direct descendants through her marriages to Donal O’Flaherty and Richard Bourke. There are extensive historical records of both families, so there are definite opportunities to make progress along this line.
We will continue to post updates from time to time as we discover more.
Brendan O'Malley
Feb 2023
References
1. https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-FT86146/scientific
2. https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-FTA85293/scientific
3. https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/R-FTC67000/scientific
