New Author: Tadhg B. Mac an Bhaird

Tadhg, a.k.a. Timothy B. Ward, has completed his much-anticipated manuscript about the Ward family in Ireland.

Origins and Early History of the Ward Family in Ireland

Tadhg B. Mac an Bhaird

Note from the Author

This book has evolved considerably over the twenty-odd years since I first produced a short version for our huge Ward Family reunion in Anoka in 2002. It is more than a labor of love – it is an effort to condense hundreds of years of history into a single overview and place our family’s history within a long-term context for the benefit of the generations coming after us. In that regard, I want to thank my brother Kevin for the idea of putting it on his blog. I also must thank our cousin, Shannon Ward Boie, for the extraordinary amount of research she has done on our family genealogy. She has single-handedly forged links with relatives in America and Ireland that would be lost without her efforts. The final revision was done in 2019, and that’s the version that appears here.

I leave the genealogy to Shannon’s able efforts. This book is not a genealogy but a history of our broader family origins extending back to a remote ancestor in the fourth century, a king of Ulster. We are familiar with Scottish clans, for example, that fusion of Irish settlers and Pictish tribes in the west of Scotland, but Irish family groupings are more usually referred to as “tribes” or “septs” – there were different rules in how they were formed, with the Irish structures being the older. The Irish were amongst the first people in Europe to develop a system of hereditary surnames. All the people of a chieftain’s territory would adopt the same surname, hence our family became the “Clann an Bháird” (pronounced “Clan-a-Ward”), meaning the family (or children) of the bard (or poet). Eoghan Mac an Bháird, the chieftain in the eleventh century who adopted “Mac an Bháird” as a permanent surname, was a professional poet although none of his poetry survives. All his sept would have adopted the same surname and intermarriage automatically integrated newcomers to the sept. Even the noblest and most well- documented families in Ireland would find it virtually impossible today to create a straight-line genealogy of their ancestors dating back more than several centuries. A quest by the earliest Irish historians in the sixth century to link their tribes’ descent to Adam and Eve, a normal practice in a Europe rapidly becoming Christianized, created muddling, confusion and inaccuracies, as mythological ancestors, saints, and even an apostle or two were placed within genealogies to enhance the prestige of different family groups. The brutal wars of the seventeenth century created chaos that resulted in mass destruction and unspeakable famines that severely blunted the existence of the Irish septs and their chieftains and decimated the population. It would be impossible to untangle them now. Nevertheless, and despite the odds, the family groupings formed by the native Irish from earlier Celtic practices did create a strong bond of identity within families and septs which has persisted and carried over unto today, in Ireland and amongst the families of the “Irish diaspora” around the world, like ours, that brought our part of the sept to America.

Ireland, being a small country and one with a prolific output of documentation after the time of Saint Patrick in the fifth century, has been able to retain a remarkable number of links with our ancestral septs and tribes. That is the point of this book, to condense all those references to the Ward’s (or Mac an Bháird’s, MacAward’s, McWard’s – there are hundreds) into a single work. We may very well be related by blood to some of the Ward’s mentioned within; we may even be related to most of them. However, it was the sept or tribal unit as a whole that dominated the thinking of Irish chieftains, and all the members of the Clann an Bháird sept were “kin” in accordance with ancient Celtic practices. As descendants of that family group, we are their kin, too, the kin of kings, warriors, poets and ecclesiastics of renown, referred to in the great seventeenth-century history of the Irish people, The Annals of the Four Masters, as “the learned family of Mac an Bháird”. This is covered at length within the Foreword and my Introduction in the book. Concurrent with our connection to our tribal unit in these pages you will also find connections to the cultural milieu from which we are descended. We often seem to have been a feisty bunch – sound familiar?

Go mbeannaí Dia daoibh go léir agus Éire go brách – May God bless you all, and Ireland forever!