Pátraic surnames in the Fiants and Patent Rolls of Ireland, Part II: The Mac Fynen of Upper Ossory

Abstract

The Fiants and the Patent Rolls of Ireland are an extraordinary and largely untapped source of information. Part I of this series, which interrogates Pátraic-surnames in the fiants and patents, answered questions about the Mac Caisín of Osraí (Ossory), who were unquestionably the close associates of the Fitzpatrick barons of Upper Ossory. Traditionally considered a hereditary medical family, the Mac Caisín of Upper Ossory sprang from a hereditary clerical family or, more broadly, a hereditary learnèd family, whose origins were in the diocese of Cill Dalua (Killaloe). It is not implausible that the Mac Caisín were patrilineally connected with the Mac Giolla Phádraig Osraí but there is no evidence of such can be provided by either conventual genealogy or Y-DNA analysis. In Part II, the spotlight falls on the Mac Fynen of Upper Ossory, and the approach follows that of Part I, i.e., securing a temporal frame of reference via which associations, familial and otherwise, can be understood, which affords some ability to distinguish name occurrences in the fiants and patents as either surnames or patronymics. And via the fiants, patents, and other records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is possible to uncover, for the first time, that in many cases, Mac Fynen was, indeed, a surname that came to be used by those who had patrilineal origins with the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Ossory. The discovery of a second surname, not instantly recognisable as related to Mac Fynen but sharing the exact same patrilineal origins, further confirms the value the Fiants and Patents of Ireland have as source material for Pátraic surname research.