The Irish counties behind America's most celebrated names — presidents, generals, artists, and pioneers
More than 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry. They include three dozen presidents, the founders of entire industries, and writers who defined American literature. But the Irish roots are often generalised — Irish-American — without the county, the townland, the specific field in Wexford or Tipperary or Kerry that a great-great-grandparent left behind. This guide restores the geography.
Presidents with Irish roots
The most famous Irish-American in history can be traced to Dunganstown, a small farming settlement near New Ross in County Wexford. It was here that Patrick Kennedy — JFK's great-great-grandfather — lived before emigrating to Boston in 1849 during the worst of the Famine. The farm at Dunganstown still stands. When Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963, the summer before his assassination, he stopped at the farmhouse and met the Kennedys who had stayed. The photographs from that afternoon show him visibly moved.
The Kennedy surname — in Gaelic, Ó Cinnéide — is one of the great names of Munster, originally from County Clare before spreading south into Tipperary and Wexford. JFK was the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States, elected 1960.
Barack Obama's Irish connection — on his mother's side — traces to Moneygall, a small village in County Offaly, formerly at the border with County Tipperary. His great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated from Moneygall to New York in 1850, aged 19, during the Famine. The Kearney family were Protestant shoemakers. Falmouth eventually settled in Indiana, where his descendants became the maternal ancestors of Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother.
When Obama visited Ireland in 2011, he stopped in Moneygall to meet distant cousins. The village now has an Obama visitor centre. His arrival and the crowds that gathered was one of the more remarkable moments in recent Irish-American cultural history.
Ronald Reagan's Irish roots lead to Ballyporeen, a small village in south County Tipperary. His great-great-grandfather, Michael Regan, emigrated from the Ballyporeen area in the mid-nineteenth century. Reagan visited Ballyporeen in 1984 during a European trip, where he was greeted by the village's entire population and presented with a pint in a pub that was swiftly renamed The Ronald Reagan.
The name Reagan — Ó Ríagáin in Gaelic — is primarily a Munster surname, concentrated in Cork and Tipperary, from the personal name Riagan meaning "little king."
Joe Biden's Irish ancestry comes from two counties. On his mother's side, through the Finnegan family of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the roots trace to the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth — a narrow finger of land south of Carlingford Lough, one of the most ancient Irish landscapes, the setting of the great Ulster Cycle epic the Táin Bó Cúailnge. On his father's side, through the Blewitt family, the roots lead to County Mayo — specifically the Ballina area in north Mayo.
Biden visited Mayo in 2016 and met Blewitt cousins. He is the second Catholic president of the United States and speaks about his Irish heritage frequently and with evident warmth.
Andrew Jackson's parents, Andrew Jackson Sr. and Elizabeth Hutchinson, emigrated from Boneybefore near Carrickfergus in County Antrim — part of the great wave of Ulster-Scots (Scots-Irish) emigration of the eighteenth century. Jackson was born in the Waxhaws region on the border of North and South Carolina, two years after his parents arrived, making him the first president born in a log cabin. He served as a militia officer in the American Revolution as a teenager.
"Old Hickory" is the only president whose parents were Irish immigrants. He visited Ireland in neither direction — he was born in America two years after the crossing — but his presidency was shaped profoundly by the Ulster-Scots values of his background.
Artists, writers and performers
Grace Kelly's grandfather, John Henry Kelly, emigrated from Newport, County Mayo in 1887 and settled in Philadelphia, where he built a successful brickwork business. His son John B. Kelly Sr. became an Olympic rowing champion — the only man to have won three Olympic gold medals in sculling — and his daughter Grace became the most famous Irish-American woman of the twentieth century.
Newport sits on Clew Bay in north Mayo, looking out toward Croagh Patrick. The Kelly family's Mayo roots are well-documented, and Grace Kelly's connection to Ireland was something the Monegasque royal family acknowledged publicly. She was Oscar-winning actress before she became Princess Grace of Monaco.
Eugene O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, emigrated from County Cork to New York as a child in 1856 during the Famine's aftermath. He became one of the most celebrated actors in America, playing the Count of Monte Cristo thousands of times. Eugene O'Neill, born in a hotel room in Times Square, grew up in the shadow of that success and the trauma of an immigrant Catholic family navigating America.
His plays — Long Day's Journey Into Night, Ah, Wilderness!, Mourning Becomes Electra — are deeply marked by that immigrant Catholic Irish experience: guilt, ambition, the weight of family, the longing for something Ireland never quite provided. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. Long Day's Journey is still considered one of the greatest plays in the American theatrical canon.
John Ford — born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine — was the son of John Augustine Feeney, who had emigrated from Spiddal in County Galway, a Gaeltacht village on the south shore of Galway Bay where Irish is still spoken as a first language. Ford directed The Quiet Man (1952), set and filmed in Connemara and Mayo, with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara — a mythologised, golden-lit vision of Ireland that shaped how Irish-Americans imagined their ancestral homeland for a generation.
He is considered one of the greatest directors in Hollywood history, winner of four Academy Awards for Best Director — a record. His Irish identity was central to his self-conception throughout his life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's father, Edward Fitzgerald, was of Irish-Catholic heritage from Maryland, with roots traced to County Fermanagh through the McQuillan family on his mother's side. Fitzgerald grew up in the Midwest — St. Paul, Minnesota — aware of his Irish-Catholic heritage as something slightly embarrassing in the Protestant-dominant world of old money he aspired to enter. The social anxiety of The Great Gatsby — the outsider longing for acceptance by the old rich — has been read as a specifically Irish-American tension.
His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants. Fitzgerald was baptised Catholic, educated at Catholic schools, and carried a lifelong ambivalence about his heritage and faith.
Flannery O'Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia, was of Irish-Catholic heritage on both sides. The O'Connor name leads to County Clare and the west of Ireland — Ó Conchobhair, a great medieval dynasty that once ruled Connacht. The strain of deeply particular Catholic faith that runs through all of O'Connor's fiction — its grotesque grace, its flashes of violent redemption — is rooted in an Irish-American Catholicism carried down through Southern soil.
She wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Wise Blood, and dozens of short stories, all set in the American South, all saturated with the theological intensity of a woman who read Aquinas daily, corresponded with intellectuals across the world, and died of lupus at 39. She is widely considered the greatest American short story writer of the twentieth century.
Labour leaders, generals and civic figures
Mary Harris was born in Cork City — some accounts say the village of Inchigeela in County Cork — and emigrated with her family to Canada as a child, eventually settling in the United States as a young woman. After her husband and four children died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867 in Memphis, and after her dress shop in Chicago was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, she joined the labour movement and became its most fearless voice.
"Mother Jones" organised coal miners in West Virginia, led children's marches to protest child labour, and was arrested repeatedly well into her eighties. She was called "the most dangerous woman in America" by a West Virginia district attorney. She died in 1930 at an estimated age of 93, having organised workers for six decades. The magazine Mother Jones is named for her.
Michael Joseph Quill was born in Gurtteenreagh near Kilgarvan in County Kerry, the Kerry-Cork border country — the same mountainous landscape that produced much of the early IRA in the War of Independence, in which Quill's family participated. He emigrated to New York in 1926, aged 21, and became a subway ticket agent, then an organiser, then the founder and president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) — the union that represented New York City's subway and bus workers for his entire career.
Quill's accent was so thick that New York magistrates occasionally asked him to slow down. His politics were aggressively leftist. He led the subway strike of 1966 that shut down New York City for twelve days and was arrested mid-strike, dying of a heart attack in custody a few weeks later. He remains one of the most consequential Irish-American labour leaders of the twentieth century.
William Russell Grace was born in Riverstown, County Cork, the son of a Protestant Irish family. He left Cork for Peru as a young man, built a shipping empire, returned to New York, and in 1880 was elected the first Irish-Catholic Mayor of New York City. His election was described by the press as either the beginning of a new era of tolerance or the end of civilisation, depending on the paper.
Grace founded W. R. Grace & Co., which became one of the largest shipping companies in the Americas. He funded the construction of Grace Church and donated extensively to Catholic charities. His election as mayor broke a barrier that had never been broken before in New York's history, and he was re-elected in 1884.
John Joseph Hughes was born in Annaloghan, County Tyrone, and emigrated to the United States in 1817, aged 19. He was ordained a priest in Philadelphia and rose to become the first Archbishop of New York — a position he held from 1842 until his death. He oversaw the construction of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, one of the greatest acts of institutional ambition in Irish-American history.
Hughes was known as "Dagger John" for the cross he drew before his name that critics read as an aggressive flourish. He confronted anti-Catholic nativism directly, threatened retaliation against Protestant churches when Catholic churches were threatened with burning, and established the parochial school system in New York that educated generations of Irish immigrants.
More celebrated Irish-Americans
Philip Henry Sheridan was born to Irish immigrant parents — his father John Sheridan from Killinkere, County Cavan — in either Albany, New York or Somerset, Ohio (he was famously cagey about his birthplace, possibly to sidestep constitutional issues with presidential ambitions). He was one of the three great Union generals of the Civil War, alongside Grant and Sherman. His Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864 — burning the valley to deny it to Confederate forces — is one of the most debated military actions of the war.
Sheridan rose to Commanding General of the US Army. His portrait hung in the homes of Irish-American families across the country as evidence of what the immigrant Irish could achieve.
Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the longest-lived of all the Founding Fathers, dying at 95. His family — the Carrolls of Maryland — were Old English Catholic gentry whose Irish roots connected to the ancient Ó Cearbhaill dynasty of Kings County (modern County Offaly) in the Irish Midlands. They had come to Maryland as Catholic colonists in the 1680s.
Carroll's willingness to sign was an act of personal risk: Catholics in colonial America were legally marginalised. His signature became a symbol of Catholic American belonging that was cited for centuries after. He founded the Bank of Maryland and was a senator from Maryland. He outlived all other signatories by decades.
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