The most frequent family names with roots in County Limerick:
County Limerick sits at the broadest point of the Shannon estuary — Ireland's longest river spreads here into a wide tidal channel that gave the city its strategic importance. Limerick city was a major Viking settlement (Hlymrekr), a Norman stronghold, and a sieged Jacobite city. The Treaty of Limerick (1691), signed after the Williamite War, guaranteed rights to Irish Catholics — rights that were promptly broken, setting in motion the Penal Laws and a century of Catholic dispossession.
Frank McCourt's memoir 'Angela's Ashes' made Limerick synonymous with Irish poverty in the mid-twentieth century: the lanes and tenements, the chronic unemployment, the emigrant ship. It's a partial portrait, but an indelible one.
The Fitzgerald family — the Geraldines — were among the most powerful Norman dynasties in Ireland, and Limerick was central to their territory. The O'Brien clan, from whose kingdom County Clare also takes much of its character, controlled much of the county before the Norman conquest.
Limerick emigrants settled prominently in New York, Boston, and Melbourne. The Limerick Lace tradition — a form of needle-run lace developed in the nineteenth century — was carried abroad by emigrant women and became part of Irish-American domestic culture. The Moloney, Considine, and McMahon names appear throughout Irish-American genealogical records from the mid-nineteenth century.
Love Ireland has covered Limerick's revival — the city's regeneration, the Hunt Museum, the vibrant food scene, and the extraordinary countryside of the county's northern reaches along the Shannon. If Limerick is your ancestral county, our newsletter is a weekly update from the place your family left.
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