Surnames and a Theory of Social Mobility - University of Chicago ...

of each other. Thus the Protestant population now will be the descendants of the
Protestant settlers, and the Catholic population the descendants of the native Irish.
However, surname evidence suggests that there have been considerable
transitions of population between the two religious groups. 24 Thus if we take a
sample of surnames of exclusively Scottish origin and look at the religious affiliation
of the holders in the 1911 Irish Census, we find that a full 14% of them were now
Catholic. 25 And similarly if we take a sample if native Irish surnames, once
exclusively Catholic, we find that again in 1911 12% of the holders were Protestants
of some form. 26 There had thus been a two way movement of population across
what would seem to be an impenetrable religious divide.
What drove these transitions To look at this it is useful to divide Ireland in
1911 into the 6 counties with the greatest share of Protestants – Armagh, Antrim,
Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone – which became Northern Ireland,
and the other 26. Figure 17 shows the location of these counties, dark shaded.
Figure 18 shows the share of each surname type that were Catholic for those aged
30+ and 0-29 in each region in 1911.
Figure 19 reveals that surnames were changing to the predominant religion of
each region. In the south 97% of the Irish surnames were still Catholic, while in the
six northern counties only 66% of these surnames remained Catholic. In
counterbalance, in the northern counties 93% of Scotch surnames remained non-
Catholic, while in the south 34% of the Scotch surnames were now held by
Catholics.
24 This is pointed out in Kennedy et al., 2012. The sections here just amplify their
observations.
25 These surnames were chosen to be exclusively Scottish in origin: Bothwell, Buchanan,
Cathcart, Fullerton, Girvan, Hamilton, Laird, McGregor, Orr, and Sproule.
26 These Irish surnames are: Boyle/O’Boyle, Doherty/O’Doherty, Grady/O’Grady, Han(n)away,
McBride. Hanaway was included because it is the surname of my maternal grandfather who
himself appears in the census.