The Duggan Family
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My search for the DUGGAN family proved to be the hardest of all, this seems mainly due to the fact that our Duggan’s were not always known as Duggan. After my search had hit a brick wall, I started looking for name vairents without much success at first.
This led me to do some research into the origins of the name
of Duggan, which developed from the original Irish name of O’Dubhagain
from a diminutive of dubh, "black", is anglicised primarily as "Duggan",
but may also be found as "Dugan" or "Doogan", the latter
representing a more accurate rendition of the Irish pronunciation. This would
have changed over time for several reasons, in medieval times the spelling
of surnames was rarely consistent, scribes and church officials recorded names
as they sounded rather than adhering to any specific spelling rules, it was
common to find the same individual referred to with different spelling of
the surname in the ancient chronicles. This led to spelling variations of
the surname Duggins that are preserved in archival documents of this era include
Dugan, Duggan, O'Duggan, Dougan, Douggan, Dewgan, Deugan and many more.
In more resent times censuses were introduced the first being in 1841, each
householder was required to complete a census schedule giving the address
of the household, the names, ages, sex, occupations and places of birth of
each individual residing in his or her accommodation, the enumerator then
collected the census schedules and these were copied into census enumerators'
books. There are two reasons here why names may vary, poor hand writting of
the householder also not all householders could read and write so the enumerator
would have to fill in the census schedule for them, the enumerator would not
always be able to understand an accent of the resident (our Duggans were Irish
so at this time they most likely had strong Irish accents).
Some possible name variants of Duggan are Dougan, Dugan, Dugga,
Duggin, Duggins, Duigan.
Looking under these variants I found an entry on the 1891 cenus for a Richard
Duggins one of his children was Oliver age 10, I continued along these lines
and found almost all of Oliver’s ancestors under the name of Duggins
and Duggin, this included death registrations which are more reliable for
correct surnames. The occurrence of Duggins and Duggin appears too often for
it to be one of the type of spelling variant described above. In my opinion
our Duggans started off as Duggins or Duggin, they seem to have only started
using Duggan in the late 1800’s. As stated earlier they are all descended
from the original name of O’Dubhagain. First found in County Clare where
they held a family seat from very ancient times.
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This page was last updated November 11th 2013