More about the Doris book

It has been a long time since I have added to this Blog but I felt I should keep it going so here are a few comments. Since the book on the Doris Family of Lettermacaward was published, I have heard from a number of people in the States who are members of the family. Most of them seem to have found the book while surfing, so I have high hopes that eventually we will trace scattered members of the family who we know little or nothing about and add their details to a future edition. So far I have done very little to spread the word about the book but in the New Year I hope to send out some cards or letters about the book to every Doris or Dorans I can find in telephone directories etc. I have bought a copy of the book to put into the reference section of the Dungloe Library - the Glenties Library has been closed, unfortunately - and will send this off along with my Christmas cards. Then there are various other reference libraries and collections, such as the National Archives in Dublin, the Library of Congress and the Latter Day Saints, not to mention other more local collections like the Greenock Library and the Linenhall in Belfast. This will take a year or two, I'd say, by which time there will probably be an expanded edition and I'll probably have to start again! Anyway, to anyone who has bought the book, to anyone in the family and to anyone who has found this blog by accident, have a wonderful Christmas and a successful and healthy New Year! Nollaig Shona agus Bliain Úr Faoi Mhaise Daoibh!

The book is available

Finally, after a lot of messing around and false starts, the book is now available through Lulu.com. I have seen the first draft copy and I have no complaints about the quality of the printing and binding (I just wish the interface had been a little easier to manage!) If anyone wants to contact me about the contents or any aspect of the book, they can do so at dorisfamily@hotmail.co.uk. I have a long list of people to contact, so I'll get on with that!

The Book Is Coming!

I have finally managed to get the book on the Lettermacaward Doris family to the stage of publication. The process itself was tricky and I pity anyone with no computer experience trying to work their way through it. I needed a lot of help from a friend who has produced lots of reports and is very familiar with Microsoft Word and without his help I would have been completely lost. I did make one fundamental mistake with the book - I intended to market it on Amazon, but it seems that the format I chose (which was nearly A4 size) can't be registered with Amazon. This is a pity but it isn't a big deal - people can still order copies through Lulu itself. When I get my first copy back and have checked it for quality, I will then go back onto the Lulu website and put it on "general release" and then I will have to write to as many members of the Doris, Dorans and Doorish family as I can find online and in telephone directories to tell them that it is available and how to go about getting a copy. I am offering it as a download for £5 as well as in book form. As a PDF file, the book looks very good and I very much hope that the Lulu printing and binding do it justice. I will put more information on this blog over the next few weeks when the book arrives.

Irish First Names

I have already discussed some points about Irish surnames in this blog but I feel I should also say a few words about first names. Ancient Irish first names were complex. While some of them were very common - names like Tuathal, Fiach, Ceallach, Aedh - and are found in many different lines in many parts of the country, others are very uncommon. In many cases, the names invoke the protection of a force of nature, like the sea, the storm (the element anfadh is found in Irish names). Some of them seem to be descriptive, giving a colour with another element which is a placename. Thus Dubh Eamhna and Donn Clochair probably mean the Black Haired One of Eamhain and the Brown Haired One of Clogher respectively. Some of them invoke the protection of a saint, like Giolla Phádraig or Maol Chiaráin. The important thing to remember about these ancient names is that they were so varied because surnames didn't exist at that time. However these names were composed, they needed to be more distinctive because of the lack of surnames. In some cases bearers of the more common names would be given a nickname. After surnames came in in the tenth and eleventh centuries, names began to become less varied. Eventually, they were almost limited to the saints' names that are so common today, like Peadar, Tomás, Pádraig. However, it should be borne in mind that in English, Irish names were frequently mangled out of all recognition. Conall became Cornelius, Donncha became Dionysius, Nóra became Honoria, Síle became Cecilia. Don't get the idea that your ancestor was posh just because he is called Aeneas Docherty. The Aeneas is probably Aonghus, or Angus as it is better known to English speakers. This can be seen very clearly in the recent talk about Barrack Obama's ancestor, who apparently was called Falmouth Kearney. Falmouth is not an Irish name and it is almost certainly a corrupt rendering of an Irish name like Feilimidh or Phelimy as it is sometimes given in English. Another very important point about first names is the Gaelic custom of naming the first boy after the paternal grandfather, the second boy after the maternal grandfather, the first girl after the paternal grandmother and the second girl after the maternal grandmother. There was no rule after this, but it was common for subsequent children to be named after their own parents. It was thought to be very unlucky to name a child after yourself without going through the grandparents' names first - either you or the child would die! The importance of this for the genealogist is obvious. You can often reconstruct the names of previous generations by looking at the names of the children in a family. In general, this rule only applied in families where the link to the Irish language was strong and as they became more urbanised and removed from their roots they tended to lose this custom. However, it is always worth looking out for this pattern, as it is a Godsend to the genealogist

Odds and Ends

There are a number of different Doris individuals mentioned in records on the internet which I have not included in the family history study because they are out of any meaningful context. There is nothing to tell us where they came from or who they were. For example, there are occasional references to Doris individuals in other parts of Ireland, like Cork or Carlow, but they don't seem to form any kind of recognisable pattern. The Cornelius Doris who was a tailor in New York in the 1840s and was mentioned in the book The Irish of New York is also a mystery. The convict Duross family in Australia are also a mystery. They seem to have arrived in the Antipodes in the 1820s and one member of the family, Constable William Duross, had a walk-on part in the tale of Ned Kelly. These Durosses seem to have been of Protestant stock, which is unusual. However, in spite of occasional occurrences of the name and its variants in other areas, the vast majority of instances of the Doris name are found in places like Fermanagh and Tyrone in the north, with colonies in Mayo, Donegal and Scotland by the 19th. century.

Different spellings of the name

One of the most difficult things in genealogy is getting to understand the context of our ancestors' lives. It is all too easy to make false assumptions by applying modern ways of thinking to problems in the past. One example of this is the spelling of surnames. Our surname has been spelled in a bewildering variety of forms over the last few centuries. If we take the broader Doris family from all over the north of Ireland, we find Doris, Dooris, Douris, Dourish, Doorish, Dooriess, Doriss, Duris, Durish, Douross, Duross, O'Daris, O'Dowrish, O'Dorris. Within the Donegal family alone, we find Doris, Dorris, Doran, Dorrans, Dorans, Dorrens, McEldore, McIldore, in 19th. and 20th. century records. Why is there such a variety?

We are used to living in a literate, English-speaking society. We can read official communications and when we go to the registrar's office, the registrar speaks the same language as we do. It was not like that for our ancestors. Remember that most of our ancestors were illiterate, though many of them were highly educated - they knew hundreds of songs, stories and poems off by heart and were steeped in ancient traditions, even though they couldn't read or write. They were also primarily Irish speaking and the officials they dealt with were English speaking. They were not in a position (in the 19th. century, anyway) to correct the clerks when they wrote what they thought they heard rather than what the person really said.

In many cases, the name was confused with other names which were common or familiar in the area. Thus Doris became Doran in Ireland. In Scotland, where the name Dorrans is found among native Scots of Protestant background, Doris individuals often became Dorrans or Dorans in records. In land records, the names McEldore or McIldore were sometimes used, which seems to be a mistake for a Gaelic form of Dyer.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Doris name is the extent to which widely dispersed families ended up settling for the version Doris or Dorris, abandoning versions like Doorish and Douris, which are far less common. Why did this happen? Was it because it had a Classical, "educated" feel to it? Was it because it was easy to spell? Were these families sporadically in contact with each other? It is an interesting question.

Getting ready for publication.

Hello again! I haven't added to this blog for a long time, as I have been busy getting the document on the history of the Doris family in Lettermacaward ready for publication, scanning in pictures and experimenting with fonts and layouts. I have decided to use Lulu to publish it. This is an online self-publishing company - you upload the text and cover specifications to them electronically and then they print and bind a copy whenever anyone orders one, through Amazon or Lulu itself. Some people criticise Lulu and say that it is just a vanity publisher but it seems to be an ideal setup for people like me. There are no problems with distribution and no danger of producing too many copies. A book like this might conceivably sell five hundred copies worldwide if there are enough members of the family who are interested but the chances are that it will only be bought by a few dozen people. There is no way of knowing until it's published. So far, I am finding the Lulu process simple enough to understand but I am a bit confused by the cover instructions! Fortunately, I have a friend who is very good with computers and he has agreed to help me. Once the document has been uploaded, I will order a copy myself to see whether everything is OK and then it will be available for sale to the public. That's when the next phase begins. I doubt very much whether anyone has read this blog yet but as soon as the book is available, I will have to contact people with the names Doris, Doorish and Dorans to inform them about the blog and the book. I will do this through genealogy noticeboards, telephone directories and hopefully eventually through word of mouth among scattered members of the family. If there is anyone reading this, I will keep you posted on how things go and on the estimated timescale. Watch this space!

The Doris and Travers Families

In the mid-19th. century, a large number of people came from Donegal to the West Coast of Scotland. Many Donegal people settled in the area around Greenock. Among them were a number of Doris individuals from Letter. Unfortunately, the name Dorrans was common among the Scottish population in that area and this is why almost anyone with names like Dorrian, Doran or Doris ended up being called Dorans or Dorrans in Scottish records. In other words, while the name Dorans often disguises a member of the Doris family, it can equally well stand for a number of other Irish families. In the 1840s, a Travers family from Ireland also settled in Greenock - presumably they were fleeing from the famine. In 1892 my great-grandfather Thomas Doris/Dorins married Mary Ellen Travers in Greenock. It is possible that the connection between the two families went back over a generation. In the 1861 census, two individuals called Dorans were living in the same house as the Travers family in Greenock. If this is the same Travers family, then they came originally from Co. Cork. Mary Ellen Travers was the daughter of Patrick Travers and Catherine Carr or Kerr. Patrick Travers was born in 1840 in Castletownsend near Skibbereen. His father was also called Patrick Travers. The elder Patrick died in Skibbereen workhouse in 1880, aged eighty years. His wife was called Mary Keeffe and she died in Castletownsend in 1867. These Traverses seem to have been an English family which settled in Ireland during the Munster Plantation in Elizabethan times. I have ordered some research which may help to establish if there was any connection between my great-grandmother's family and the Travers family who fled the Famine in the 1840s.

The Doris Family in Mayo

The Doris family first arrived in Mayo at the end of the 18th. century, when thousands of people, mostly Catholics from Armagh and Tyrone, were driven out of their homes by marauding gangs of Loyalist terrorists, supported by the local Protestant landowners and the magistrates. Because they came from areas where weaving was practiced, they had the necessary skills to establish the linen weaving industry in the west. For this reason some of the landlords in Mayo and Sligo welcomed them onto their estates, and Lord Altamont built a new town under the shadow of Croagh Patrick called Louisburg. It was in this town that the Doris family settled. By the mid-19th. century, they had moved closer to Westport. Several of the Doris family in Westport became prominent in the late 19th. century and the early twentieth century. William and PJ Doris founded the Mayo News. William was a founder member of the Land League, served time in prison for his political activities and later became an MP for the Nationalist Party. His brother PJ became a radical republican, a supporter of Sinn Féin. The two brothers fell out over politics and were never reconciled.

A fuller account of the Mayo Doris family can be found in the book The Doris Family Of Lettermacaward, which should be available around the beginning of April from Amazon.

Myths About Doris Origins

There are quite a lot of myths about the origins of the Doris family. One of the most common concerns the Spanish sailors who survived the Armada swimming ashore. One of these men, the story goes, was called Dorizio and this then became Doris. There are several problems with this story. Firstly, these stories are very common in the west of Ireland but there is no evidence that any of them are true. No family can unequivocally trace its origins back to a Spanish sailor from those times. The other problem is that most of the Doris families are found way inland and when the first clear records appear - the Hearth Money Rolls of the 1660s - there were already a number of names which clearly mutated into Doris, because they are found in the same areas where the name Doris is found a hundred and fifty or two hundred years later. These are names like O'Dowrish, O'Daris and O'Dorris. Even if these disguise a Spanish origin, the sailor must have been very prolific! Families with names like this are found across the Clogher valley and up into Antrim in these records, and this is only about seventy years after the Armada!

Another common theory is that the Doris family originated in what is now Greece and that one of them was a general in the Roman army who was granted land in Co. Down by the Romans for his military service. This story originated in the States in the nineteenth century. As American researchers like Gene Dorris have pointed out, this is not possible, as in no part of Europe do surnames date back two thousand years and the Romans never invaded Ireland as an organised force (though there were probably incursions into Ireland by Romano-British mercenaries).

The plain and simple truth is that we are a family of Gaelic origin, in the sense that our identity as a family was moulded and formed over a thousand years ago in an Irish-speaking environment.

However, I should point out that the latest evidence from geneticists is that the Irish are not really Celts. The Irish language was probably brought to Ireland about two thousand five hundred years ago from Central Europe but this language change was probably not accomplished by a major change of population, only by a small elite group. The gene pool of Ireland is much older and is basically very similar to that of the Basques of Spain and France, who speak the only non-Indo-European language surviving in Western Europe. We are probably descended from hunter-gatherers who recolonised the north of Europe from the south after the last Ice Age.

The Origins of the Doris Family.


Irish surnames are usually comprised of Mac or Ó with the forename of a famous ancestor. Mac means son of and Ó means grandson of. Thus MacCann (Mac Cana in the original Irish) means “Son of Cana”, and O’Brien (Ó Briain in the original Irish) means “Grandson of Brian”.

Ireland was one of the first countries in Europe to have a system of heritable surnames. They began to develop in the ninth century and it is thought that all Irish people would have taken a surname by the 11th. century.

It is clear from early anglicised forms of our name that the original form of the name was something like Ó Dubhruis. Thus, all members of the O’Doorish, Doorish, Dorris, Doris family are descended from an individual whose name was something like Dubhruis (pronounced Doorish).

If our eponymous ancestor was called Dubh Ruis or Dubhruis, what does this name mean and has history recorded anything about him? There is a full discussion of this in the book, The Doris Family of Lettermacaward, but the name seems to mean “Black-Haired One of the Headland”.

There are a few different individuals with the name Dubh Ruis in ancient Irish records. To distinguish these different Dubh Ruises, I will call them the West Cork Dubh Ruis, the Limerick Dubh Ruis and the Oriel Dubh Ruis. The West Cork Dubh Ruis was a poet and harper, the hero of an ancient romance. The Limerick Dubh Ruis was an ancestor of a number of saints and kings in that area. However, the Doris or Doorish family in historical times is associated with areas like Tyrone and Fermanagh in the north of Ireland and there was another Dubh Ruis who was associated with that area. I believe that he is the most likely candidate for our ancestor. This Dubh Ruis was a member of a branch of the Airghialla tribe called the Uí Chremthainn and he died at the beginning of the ninth century. There is a full discussion of this Dubh Ruis and the other Dub Ruis individuals in the book, including the line of descent of his family back to the High Kings of Ireland.

The Doris Family of Lettermacaward.

Who are the Doris family of Lettermacaward? At some stage in the early 19th. century, a member of the Doris family (or perhaps more than one) settled in the southern end of the Rosses in County Donegal.

As far as we can tell, they came from the Ballygawley area in Tyrone via County Mayo, where a branch of the Doris family was also established in the late 18th. century in the area around Westport.

We first get some clear information about the Donegal family in the middle of the 19th. century, when a Condy Doris (often given as Condy Doran or Condy McEldore in records) lived in the townland of Dooey in the parish of Lettermacaward. Condy was married twice, once to Anne McShane of Ranny and then later to Catherine Melly of Ranny. He had a number of children by these two wives. We know of quite a few of these children because of their marriage, census and death records in Ireland and Scotland, but we do not have an exhaustive list.

My great-grandfather was his youngest son, Thomas Doris, who was born in Dooey in 1864. His father Condy died just two years later, in 1866. Most of the children of Condy Doris ended up in Greenock, a small town on the Clyde near Glasgow. Here they worked on tugboats and ships. Many of them were recorded in Scottish records as Dorans or Dorins instead of Doris and many of them emigrated from Scotland to the United States, especially New York and New Jersey. There are hundreds of descendants of Condy Doris alive today in many countries.

The Doris Family of Lettermacaward

This blog is intended to give a brief account of the Doris family and its origins. It is particularly of interest to members of the Doris family whose ancestors came from Donegal (who sometimes use the variants Dorans or Dorins) but this blog will also give general information which should be of interest to any member of the Doris/Dooris/Doorish family whose ancestors originate in Ireland. (Other people with the surname Doris are not of Irish origin at all – they came from France, Slovakia, or Greece). A fuller account of the family history is to be found in the book The Doris Family of Lettermacaward by John Doris (shortly to be available through Amazon). This blog will also be used to collect and correct information about the family, with the ultimate aim of producing a revised edition of the book at some time in the future and making the information available to as many members of the family as possible.

Over the next few weeks I will be putting more information on this blog, along with questions and areas for further research, along with a number of shameless plugs for the book!