Some Account of the Family of O'Hurly

About This Source

This article ran across two volumes and two years of the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archæological Society (CHAS), a quarterly founded in 1892 by the Society, which itself was founded in 1891 — four installments in all. It began in Volume XI of the Second Series (1905), No. 67 (July–September), pp. 105–123, continuing in the same volume at pp. 177–183 ("Continued from page 123"). It then resumed a year later in Volume XII (1906), pp. 26–33 ("Continued from Vol. XI., page 183"), and concluded at pp. 76–88 ("Continued from page 33"). This page groups those four installments as Part One (Vol. XI, 1905) and Part Two (Vol. XII, 1906) below, each split into its two original installments, to keep the site's structure honest to how the piece actually appeared in print rather than imposing a tidier scheme after the fact. The scanned copy behind this transcription is a Google Books digitization of the Harvard College Library's set (bequest of Mrs. Anne E. P. Sever) for both volumes, so page citations here follow Harvard's copy rather than the original print run.

The article itself does not carry a byline in the surviving text — it opens and closes in the first person, across all four installments. The author explains that the piece grew out of a field visit to Ballinacarriga Castle in August 1896 with Herbert Webb Gillman, a CHAS Vice-President who had since died, and that much of the material came from Gillman's notes together with family papers lent by J. C. D. Hurly of Fenit, Co. Kerry.

On the pedigree itself: the family history traced here reaches back, via the Books of Lecan and Ballymote and the seventeenth-century historian Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (MacFirbis), to the legendary Milesian origin-schema common to Irish bardic genealogies — Oilioll Olum, Cormac Cas, and the common ancestor Blod shared with the O'Brien/Thomond line. Modern historians treat this deep pre-Christian portion as origin-legend rather than documentary fact: valuable evidence of what learned Gaelic families believed and asserted about themselves, and of how nineteenth-century antiquarians received it, but not verifiable genealogy in the way a documented pedigree since the sixteenth or seventeenth century is. Section-level notes below flag this distinction where it matters.

On Part Two: the 1906 installments turn from pedigree and bardic origin material to a dense run of primary-source transcriptions — a 1517 episcopal resignation document, a Down Survey index and book of distribution for the Ballinacarriga-area parishes, and, notably, a long series of Fiants of Charles I. and two family wills (1628, 1641). Fiants and the chancery enrolments behind them are exactly the kind of record that suffered heavily in the 1922 Four Courts fire (see the note on this in Part One, Section 10); where an original has been lost, a transcription like this one may be at or near the closest surviving copy of its wording.