Some Account of the Family of O'Hurly

Historical Note — the Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniae

The Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniae ("Book of the Public Offices of Ireland") is a genuine historical reference work, compiled by the barrister and antiquary Rowley Lascelles and published in two volumes around 1824–1830, listing officeholders, judges, and members of the Irish Parliament from the medieval period onward. Citing it here gives Thomas Hurly's 1585 attendance at Perrot's Parliament and Sir William Hurly's 1689 attendance at King James's Parliament — both already mentioned narratively in Section 5 — an actual documentary register behind them, rather than family tradition alone. This is the first point in the series the article names its source for either event.

Historical Note — the Hurley Chalice

The chalice depicted in this plate is a genuine, identifiable object: a silver-gilt chalice dated 1633, associated with Randal Hurley of Ballinacarriga Castle — the same Randal Hurly named in Section 1 as the castle's builder — and his wife, Lady Ellen de Courcy, apparently donated following the death of Randal Óg. By the time this article was published in 1905, it was housed at St. Mary's Catholic Cathedral, Cork (the "North Cathedral"), which is the location the plate's own caption gives.

One thing the caption doesn't address: the North Cathedral itself was only built between 1808 and 1839, roughly a century and three-quarters after the chalice was made, so it can't be where the chalice first came to rest. We've since been able to partly close that gap. The chalice itself carries an inscribed later dedication — "Ex Dono J. Coppinger… Parochia Sta. Maria, 1722" — recording that a J. Coppinger formally donated it to St Mary's Parish in 1722, well before the cathedral building existed. The parish itself evidently kept the chalice, and later built its grand cathedral around its existing community and possessions, rather than the chalice arriving only once the building did. The Coppinger name is a plausible fit here — Cork had a prominent Catholic merchant family of that name in this period, associated elsewhere with Coppinger's Court in West Cork — but we have not been able to identify this particular J. Coppinger or how the chalice passed from the Hurleys to Coppinger hands between 1633 and 1722; that stretch remains unaccounted for.

Historical Note — a Second Certification

The certification above, dated Dublin, May 8th, 1837, is a separate instance from the certification already seen in Section 4, dated March 7th (there also given elsewhere in the article as March 22nd), 1836. Taken together, they suggest Owen Connellan certified this family's pedigree material on at least two distinct occasions roughly a year apart — consistent with an ongoing, ordinary process of a family consulting a recognized authority for authentication as more material came to light or was compiled, rather than a single one-off transaction.

Historical Note — Bruodin, Ferrar, Malte-Brun, and Camden

The four sources opening this run of corroborating quotations span more than three centuries of writing about Ireland. Anthony Bruodin (Antonius Bruodinus, c. 1625–1680) was an Irish Franciscan friar and historian working on the continent, best known for polemical Latin works defending the Irish Catholic cause; the "History of Ireland" cited here is most likely one of these Latin compilations, known to English readers chiefly through secondary citation, as here. William Camden's Britannia (first published 1586, with the Ireland material expanded in later editions) was the foundational county-by-county antiquarian survey of the British Isles, a starting point for centuries of subsequent local history writing. Conrad Malte-Brun (1775–1826) was a Danish-French geographer whose multi-volume Universal Geography was a standard reference work translated and reprinted well into the nineteenth century. John Ferrar's History of Limerick (first published 1767, revised 1787) is a genuine, still-consulted local history of the city and county. Chaining together sources like these — older authorities cited inside newer ones — was a standard nineteenth-century method of building a case; as Section 6's note on "what counts as proof" discussed, though, a long chain of citations is not automatically stronger than its weakest link, and we have not independently verified Bruodin's or Malte-Brun's underlying claims here.

Historical Note — Fitzgerald's History of Limerick and Lewis's Topographical Dictionary

Patrick Fitzgerald and James J. M'Gregor's History, Topography, and Antiquities of the County and City of Limerick (1826–27) and Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) are both substantial, still-standard nineteenth-century reference works, parish-by-parish and county-by-county respectively, of exactly the kind that would have been readily available to this article's author in 1905. Their entries on Castletown and Kilcullane castle add real corroborating detail to castles this article has already named (Kilcullane appears in Section 5's list of four Hurly-associated castles), while "Killelonehan" is very likely the same place given as "Killonahan" in Section 5 — the spelling difference is typical of the period's inconsistent anglicization of Irish place-names, not evidence of two different castles.