Irish Project - Are Donoghue and O'Donoghue interchangeable?

Question

I'm working on creating profiles related to the Titanic Project and I came across a husband named Patrick Joseph O'Donoghue. So I created a profile. Well, guess what? I found his birthdate on a WWII registration and then found his birth registration in County Kerry, Ireland. This all matches newspaper clippings, yea!!!? Except the baptism record is Donoghue, not O'Donoghue. Ordinarily, I would think that I need to change the LNAB to what is on the baptism. But should I? I am not sure of Irish naming patterns and if O'Donoghue and Donoghue are interchangeable.

Comments

My (admittedly limited) experience is that yes, they can be interchangeable (but are not always).

My (again limited experience) is that the omission of the O' on official "British" records is to deny heritage, as the O' signifies descent from -- just as Mac/Mc so signifies.  Example -- O'Neille / O'Neill / O'neil / Oneal/ etc from the Uí Néill

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Hmmm. I am more inclined to leave the O'. He clearly used it in later records. I feel like it goes against our policy to use the earliest record,  but then again,  the record could be purposely flawed.

I'll leave it for now and see if anyone else could weigh in.

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I've had records where the family CLEARLY uses the O'(whatever name), yet half the children's birth registrations omit the O' and just register as (whatever name).

The naming guidelines allow for "family usage" (if the family name was more commonly spelled in a different way at the time of the birth) -- especially where it is clear -- that supersedes the "earliest record".

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Yes, in the relevant English clerical practice in Ireland, O'Whatever and Whatever are interchangeable. So are McThing, MacThing, and Thing. (And no, Mac versus Mc versus O' doesn't say a darn thing about Scottish versus Irish, although O' is definitely more common in Ireland.)

Because "Whatever" or "Thing" doesn't tell you whether the family name was a single-generation patronymic (Mc or Mac) or a many-generation one (O'), it's best to record the full form if known.

(The part I don't know is whether Mc/Mac and O' were ever interchangeable.)

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This is turning into a very interesting topic. It reminded me of one of my Irish surnames:

Hogan Name Meaning

Irish: Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hÓgáin ‘descendant of Ógán’, a personal name from a diminutive of óg ‘young’, also ‘young warrior’. In the south, some bearers claim descent from an uncle of Brian Boru. In northern Ireland a surname of the same form was Anglicized as Hagan.

Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press

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The change between O or not can signify a break in the family.  As if an irish catholic converts to protestantism they would remove the O to signify a move from the irish to more english.  O means son of, some who came to the america's left the O behind in records in Ireland but were known without the O in the america's because of the discrimination against the irish. There are a few reasons for the removal of the O or in some cases the Mc.

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Lynn L, no, O doesn't mean "son of"; it means "descendant". Mac means "son". In both cases, you get the "of" by using the possessive form of the ancestor's name.

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I don't know ... whether Mc/Mac and O' were ever interchangeable commented by J Palotay 

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I don't believe they ever were, for the reason you explain immediately above this post.  They mean different degrees of relationship.

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Mac is son of in Scot, O is son of and grandson of, etc in Irish,  a simple search will show you. Because of the constant moving back and forth between the two they are often found in both countries.  Remembering that when the harvest was done in Ireland people would go to Scotland to help with the harvest there, there are lists.  And that at Mull o Kintyre people use to row across to attend church and back after.  Usually if one traces an O it will lead back to Ireland,  i would say one of the most noted surname being O'Clereigh/O'Cleary

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This is slightly off-topic, so should probably not be continued in this thread - but not all the "back and forth" was voluntary, or for benign purposes such as harvests.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland

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Also regarding the O' names -- if you go back far enough, they were male-only as Ó Whatever (with a space); and with the female version being Ní Whatever -- where "Whatever" was the ancestor's name (thus Ó Dubháin was the male descendant of Dubháin).  It was due to the (forced) Anglicisation of Ireland that turned the Ó into O', and rendered it both male and female, as the English overlords removed the space between the Ó and Whatever, and removed the fada (diacritic mark) leaving just Owhatever.  It was pretty much in protest of that removal that created the O'Whatever usage.

Further to the Mac/Mc and O' both meaning "son of" — Mac/Mc means son of, just as Nic means daughter of.  The Ó and Ní mean descended from, and should not be interchangeable with the Mac/Mc and Nic (although modern usage/common practice renders the distinction non-existent except in historic terms).

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I am not getting into that with you but suffice it to say that families were moving back and forth and settling in each other's countries prior to St. Columba born 521.  The plantation is a whole other issue, that I am well aware of.

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All I said was - "not all the migrating back and forth was voluntary".  I set no time frame on it.  

This question, however, wasn't asking about that issue, but if names such as Donoghue and O'Donoghue were/are interchangeable.  For which the answer is — usually, but not always.  (Just as Mac and Mc are interchangeable, but not always so.)

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Thank you all for your responses and it has been a great education. If time permits I'd love to do more research on this subject for a freespace. I think this is a topic that has been swept under the rug for centuries.

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While Melanie's explanation of Ó and Mac/Mc is OK in broad outline, the pedant in me bristles at the little errors, so pardon me while I nitpick:

Ó does not mean "descendant of". It means plain old "male descendant". Similarly, mac does not mean "son of". It just means "son". In all cases, you get the "of" by using the genitive (possessive) form of the ancestor's name: Ó Dubháin means "male descendant of Dubhán". (Nobody was called Dubháin. That'd be like calling someone "Dwayne's".)

Ní is a contraction of inghean Úi "[daughter] [of the male descendant]", and nic is a contraction of inghean mhic "[daughter] [of the son]", i.e. neither one means "daughter of". They were the particles used for women's names in Gaelic, but this is seldom relevant in genealogy, because the English-speaking clerks invariably imposed English naming assumptions on everyone (just as WikiTree tries to impose North American naming assumptions on all of us).

On the question of whether Ó was ever used interchangeably with mac: obviously not in Gaelic, because the one was used for clan bynames, the other for patronymics. But by the 1800s, most people used inherited family names, so it hardly mattered whether the person referred to in the name was a distant clan ancestor or a many-times-great-grandfather. Thus I wonder whether any family was ever recorded alternately as O'Whatever and MacWhatever.

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I used broad terms to get the point made re interchangeability (how they were not), and that one meant male descendant (which I did state), and the other female descendant.  I feared going more detailed would take the thread off-topic, and I did not wish to be chastised for so doing.  Maybe if Lucy takes the topic to a space page, we could get really down to the nitty gritty there!  (I'm a proud descendant of an Irish Mc, even if we spent much of my life believing he was Scottish!.)