[Bolling5] Larkin

[Arvina Copeland]

This is from a cut and paste on the internet.  So.....there could have been the choice of the name Larkin(Fierce One) or there could have been a connection to a Irish family with the surname of Larkin.  The person writing this had the surname of Larkin and their family came over during the Potato Famine from the area of Galaway.

 
      Long before there were were surnames, people were called by descriptive names. These names described where they lived or what their occupation was or what they looked like or how they behaved--just like nicknames or streetnames still do today.

      Ancient Ireland was populated by the Celts, a warrior race organized into family clans, and known for their lack of fear in battle. In the gaelic language they spoke, the word lorc meant "fierce". Some pre-Norman Celtic warrior must have so impressed his peers with his ferocity in combat that they started calling him "The Fierce One". When the name stuck, his immediate progeny would have been called sons or grandsons of Lorc. Later, a family clan named Olorcan would have arisen, made up of people descended from the original warrior. Finally, sometime in the 14th century, O'Larkin would have become a conventional surname.
     

Surname derivations are always to be taken with a grain of salt, but several sources give this one and it is consistent with the geographical distribution of the current surname.

Before the time of Cromwell the Olorcan or O Lorcain clan was prominent in County Wexford in the south of Ireland and had smaller branches in Counties Tyrone and Armagh in the north. Then Cromwell drove those who refused to declare allegiance to the British Crown and the Protestant Church into Connaught, the unsettled western part of Ireland. (This policy was summed up in the contemporary slogan "Connaught or die!".) So the Larkin surname came to be clustered in the western county of Galway as well.

Arvina




From: Diane Jones 
Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 5:57 PM
To: Bolling Family Group 5 
Subject: Re: [Bolling5] Larkin

I think Larkin was just a popular name at the time. There are too many of them for all of them to have a surname connection. Maybe there was some hero at the time by the name of Larkin that made the name popular (like Stokley Donnellson made Stokley such a popular name for boys in the early 1800’s). 

Diane J.


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