English gentry in Ireland, a move to Belfast, and a folk etymology
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
The paternal line: English gentry who held land in Ireland during and after the conquest, part of the family later moving to Belfast. English from England who happened to live in Ireland, as Jonathan Hare puts it — which places them, by any modern reckoning, among the occupiers.
The family's oral tradition holds that the O'Hares were descended from the Hares' illegitimate children, the prefix marking the descent. Hare notes he did not read the lineage book himself; his parents, aunts, uncles and grandmothers did, and the story reached him through them.
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The prefix does not mean illegitimate. Irish Ó means grandson or descendant of, the exact counterpart of Mac, son of. O'Hare is Ó hÍr, an independent Gaelic surname considerably older than any English Hare presence in Ireland.
The illegitimacy story is a folk etymology attached to a great many Irish surnames, and it is recorded here for a better reason than accuracy: it is what a colonial gentry family told itself about the people whose land it held. An origin story in which the natives are your bastards is doing a specific kind of work, and preserving it says more than correcting it away would.
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Hare, Whitson, Wickwire — three families, three lineage records, one tradition
Open →the lineRadar, chaff, and the Stanford lab at the center of Silicon Valley
Open →the wider pattern of conquestEveryone's mathematics, everyone's law — and no culture's alone
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