Where does the name Quaid come from?

Where does the name Quaid come from? It comes from rural County Limerick, Ireland. And contrary to what you'll see on practically every name origin site on the Internet, the surname Quaid is entirely unrelated to the surname McQuaid.

Quaids (blue) and McQuaids (red) in the 1901 Irish Census.
Explore the interactive map.

Of course I'm talking only about the Irish name; there is also the German Quade and Arabic Quaid, which are unrelated, as you might expect.

Growing up, I was told that our family name was originally McQuaid, and that perhaps my great-grandfather had stripped off the Mc- part to blend in when he emigrated to the United States. And of course that's roughly the story you hear from essentially every surname origin site you can find. I have gradually come to the conclusion that all those stories and web sites are just plain wrong, and I'll explain why.

Irish Names and Surnames

My second cousin Charlie Quaid planted a seed when he introduced me to the book Irish Names and Surnames (1906; complete text at archive.org), by Limerick parish priest Patrick Woulfe (or perhaps Sloinnte Gaeḋeal is Gall by An tAthair Pádraig de Bhulbh, if you prefer). Woulfe studied name origins in Limerick, at a time when the Irish language was still commonly heard in the countryside.

Woulfe observed that the Limerick name Quaid is an Anglicization of the Irish name O Cuain,:

Ó CUAIN -- I -- O Cuayn, O Quane, Quan, Quann, Quane, Quaine, (Coyne, Quaid); 'descendant of Cuan' (probably a 'pet' form of donnchuan, lord of harbours; hardly for cúán, diminutive of cú, a hound); the name of a branch of the Ui Fiachrach, anciently seated at Dun Ui Chobhthaigh, now anglicised Doonycoy, in the parish of Templeboy, Co. Sligo. At the end of the 16th century it was very scattered, but found chiefly in Cork and Limerick, in the latter of which counties it is now anglicised Quaine and Quaid.

Irish Names and Surnames is a fascinating book. It has a long list of Irish and names and their English equivalents, as you might expect, but it begins with a concise and authoritative historical and linguistic analysis of Irish names. It's very interesting but a little difficult for me to follow because Woulfe uses Irish script for all Irish language names and terms, so those are doubly unfamiliar to me.

Woulfe published several versions of the book. Some had Irish-to-English name lists, like the one linked above, and other versions had English-to-Irish lists. Some editions of the book have as few as 130 pages and others 600+, so there is a lot of variation. LibraryIreland.com (which is not the National Library of Ireland) has versions of the name lists available online. They are all converted to Roman script, to my delight but no doubt to Father Woulfe's chagrin.

Father Woulfe led a notable life aside from this book; this short biography is worth a read.

What About McQuaid?

So Quaid is a distinct surname in Limerick, not necessarily a clipped form of McQuaid. But both origins could be true -- some Quaids could be from O'Cuain, and others from McQuaid. To look into that, I turned to the 1901 Census of Ireland (available at www.census.nationalarchives.ie). In those days people didn't move around like we do now. They certainly emigrated to England and Australia and the United States in vast numbers, but within Ireland people were still largely staying near their extended families. The economic factors that would soon draw young people to Belfast and later to Dublin were only beginning to take effect.

I focused on heads of families, and searched for all variations on the names -- Quaid, Quaide, Quade, and the various Mc- and Mac- prefixed versions. Of the 874,000 heads of family recorded in the census, just 53 were Quaids, and 383 were McQuaids. The map above shows that Quaids are overwhelmingly from rural County Limerick, from Newcastle West to Croom and the surrounding country. There are a few outliers, of course, but the pattern is clear.

McQuaids, by contrast, are overwhelmingly from Ulster. There's one lone McQuaid in County Limerick, in Rathkeale, but he appears to have changed his name as a young man; his father was a Quaid. The rest of the McQuaids are clearly distinct from the Quaids.

Going one step further, there were exactly zero people named Quaid (or any variant) anywhere in Ulster in 1901, as far as I can tell. Neither heads of family nor any other role. I think that demonstrates that McQuaid did not decay into Quaid, no matter how plausible that idea might seem.

I encourage you to open up the interactive Google map. You can zoom in and out, and each point links directly to the relevant census page, so you can double-check my work.

It's possibly worth noting that forebears.io suggests that in 2014 the surname Quaid continued to be vastly more common in Munster (home of Limerick) than elsewhere in Ireland.

And Quain?

Father Woulfe said that in Limerick, O'Cuain was anglicized as Quaid or the seemingly more straightforward Quain. So what do the Quains look like in 1901?

Quaids and Quains (interactive map)

There are about 74 heads of family with the surname Quain, Quaine or Quane in the 1901 Census of Ireland, compared to 53 Quaids. Again there are a few outlying households in Dublin, County Longford and so forth, but the concentration of households is near the borders of Counties Limerick, Tipperary and Cork. The Quains and Quaids are close together and yet clearly distinct, with the Quaids to the west and the Quains to the east.

It seems plausible to me that the Irish name O Cuain ranged over this whole area, and that the anglicized form was a regional choice, possibly down to one Tudor clerk choosing Quain and the neighboring clerk favoring Quaid.

Michaelem Quain marries Alice Renehan in Croom (original)

There are some limited signs of fluidity between the Quaid/Quain surnames. There was a Michael Quaid who lived in Ballymacamore, whose descendants are named Quaid and who are DNA matches to me. But in the parish record of his marriage to Alice Renehan in 1839, his name is clearly recorded as Michael Quain. It's possibly worth noting that they were married in Croom, closer to Quain territory than Michael's parish Croagh.

Calendar of Wills and Administrations

That parish record is probably just a typo, but another more emphatic example is a man called Jeremiah, who lived in Creggane very near the Quaid/Quain frontier. In his 1891 marriage registration his name is recorded as Quaid, while in his second marriage registration in 1903 he's recorded as Quain. In both the 1901 and 1911 Census the family is recorded as Quaid, so he's a blue pin the map above. Most of his children appear to have adopted the name Quain. Confused? Everyone was. His will is registered as Jeremiah J. Quaid otherwise Quain. Ol' Otherwise, they used to call him.

All Roads Lead to Limerick

I've also been looking into the genealogy of other immigrant Quaid families, including all of the Quaids who appear in the 1940 and 1950 United States censuses. It's not as hard as it sounds -- there aren't very many of them. What I have found is consistent with these other observations. Specifically, if these Quaid families in the US can be traced back to any specific place in Ireland, it will be Limerick. And if their origin is more specific, it will be Croom or Croagh or Rathkeale or some other place matching the map above. The acting family, for example, comes from Kilfinny. 

Complications in the United States

The names Quaid and McQuaid may have distinct origins, but they have intertwined histories. For example, there was a Quaid family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania whose parents died, leaving the younger children in an orphanage. The nuns running the place, possibly from the north of Ireland, were familiar with the name McQuaid but not the much more obscure Quaid, so they "corrected" the childrens' last name. So in that family, the older children were Quaids, and the younger ones were McQuaids.

There are other cases of adults apparently choosing to change their names from Quaid to McQuaid. One example is Jeremiah Quaid of Ballymacamore, the same small farming community that my ancestors come from. Jeremiah brought his family to Chicago in about 1873. He had been a Quaid in Limerick and was a Quaid for many years in Chicago, but some time in the 1890s his entire family switched to McQuaid. One of his daughters notes that she officially changed her name by court order, so it wasn't done on a whim. The family's shared tombstone uses McQuaid.

Another example is Patrick McQuaid, who was born in Ireland and died in 1918 in New Jersey. In the 1870 Census he appears as Quade, and his first few children are called Quade in birth records. But by 1880 that family had also adopted the name McQuaid. One might be tempted to think the records around 1870 are simply wrong, but I am a DNA match to some of his descendants, so I think he is not only from Limerick but literally part of my family.

An Irish nationalist event in Chicago
Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1878

I don't know why some families chose to change their name. The lore in my family suggested that my great-grandfather changed his name the other way, from McQuaid to Quaid, to appear less obviously Irish. We now know that didn't happen, but I also think that story has the motivations exactly backwards. Irish patriotism was strong in the American immigrant community. As I'm writing this St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner, and the same spirit that established that exuberant (and, yes, excessive) expression of Irish identity was running strong in all these immigrant communities. Irish Americans joined social organizations like the Hibernian Society, Clan na Gael, or, like my great-grandfather, the Robert Emmet Council. I suspect that these Irish immigrants in the United States were proudly showing off their Irish roots by changing their names to be more obviously Irish, even if it was a little ahistorical.

Or perhaps it was just confusion, and people simply thought that McQuaid was the proper ancient form of the name. Limerick hurler Nickie Quaid is arguably the most famous Quaid in Ireland right now, and the Irish form of his name is routinely and incorrectly given as Mac Uad. So that confusion lives on, even in Ireland.

For the record, I'm not aware of any McQuaids becoming Quaids.

What Have We Learned?

Kilfinny, County Limerick

The Irish surname Quaid traces back to rural County Limerick, and despite appearances it is entirely distinct from the surname McQuaid.