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!