The Irish and Anglo-irish Landed Gentry when Cromwell Came to Ireland, Or, a Supplement to Irish Pedigrees

The name John O'Hart is associated with the magnum opus of Irish genealogy, Irish Pedigrees: The Origin and Stem of the Irish Nation, published originally in 1892 and available today as a two-volume reprint from Genealogical Publishing Company. Irish Pedigrees is a vast compendium of source materials and family histories pertaining to Irish and Anglo-Irish families, many of them brought down from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The work at hand, The Irish and Anglo-Irish Landed Gentry, was assembled by O'Hart to supplement Irish Pedigrees and can be looked upon as the missing third volume. It consists, in part, of 257 additional genealogies of Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Norman families that settled in Ireland following the English invasion. Notwithstanding the importance of the pedigrees, which fill out the first 225 and the final 75 pages of the text, the Appendix to the volume may take on ever greater importance. Comprising half of the volume, the Appendix consists largely of abstracts of primary sources that were destroyed in the Public Record Office fire of 1922. Among the most important records "preserved" by O'Hart are lists of Forfeiting Proprietors in Ireland, arranged by county and thereunder by barony; Persons Transplanted in Ireland, arranged by county; Irishmen who served in the Spanish Netherlands during the exile of Charles II; a number of lists relating to the seventeenth-century land settlements in Ireland, including Names of Persons in the [Land] Grants, persons restored to their former estates, Grantees and Purchasers of Estates forfeited in Ireland under the Williamite Confiscations; and lists of the Irish Brigades serving in France and America in the 18th and 19th centuries. In all, this prodigious work contains more than 22,000 references to surnames found in the volume, each of which is easily found in the index at the back.