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.