Where did the Kings come from in Ireland? According to the obituary of Michael King in the Wingham Times, they came from County Down. However a family oral tradition says that they came from Antrim. It would be interesting to resolve this question and find the exact location in Ireland where they originated.
Unfortunately all 19th century censuses for Ireland have been either lost or destroyed. However records from two property tax valuations still exist and these can be used as partial substitutes for censuses. Griffith's Valuation (1848-1864) was the British Goverment's response to the Famine; they downloaded responsibility for welfare to the municipalities and imposed property value taxes to pay for it. The Tithe Applotment Survey (1825-1835) was a similar exercise carried out a generation earlier. The Irish Goverment created a Index to Griffith's in the 1960s with cross-references to the Tithe Applotment Survey. Recently the Index to Griffith's was made available on CD-ROM.
A.J. Morris explains on his website how the Index to Griffith's can be used to try to identify the place of origin of Irish Ancestors. Most Irish people stayed in the same area and usually married within the community. If you know the family names of both marriage partners it may be possible to use name distributions from the Index to Griffith's to determine a likely place of origin.
Now the Kings emigrated to Canada in 1847 before Griffith's Valuation was carried out in Down and Antrim (1863) so that Griffith's can only provide an indication where they may have come from, not a definitive answer. If we can find a likely location the next step would be to search through Irish church records to find an exact match.
According to oral tradition, Owen King was married to Anne Mackin (the spelling of the name is uncertain). Two records exist in Canada which name Owen King's wife: Patrick King's death certificate in 1926 says her name was Macklin and his marriage record from 1858 says it was Magin (the writing is unclear).
Accordingly, I extracted all the Kings, Mack[ie]ns, Macklins, and McGinn/Maginns in both Antrim and Down from the Griffith's CDROM.
There were 60 Kings in Antrim with 30 of these in Belfast or its suburbs. No single other parish in Antrim had more than 4 Kings. The Christian names would indicate that most of these Kings were Protestant: there was not a single Patrick or Michael among them, although there was one Owen. In Down there were 118 Kings with the greatest concentration in an area about 25 miles south of Belfast. In the Civil Parish of Drumgooland alone there were 45 Kings [it is the 4th most common name in the Parish] and there were significant numbers in the neighboring parishes of Garvaghy (7), Dromara (4), Kilmegan (8), and Kilcoo (7). Altogether there were 69 Kings in these five parishes which together cover about the same area as Culross Township. These Kings were likely to have been Catholic since they number among them 12 Patricks, 8 Michaels and 2 Owens.
A map shows the number of times each name occurs in each Townland (a townland is a subdivision of a civil parish which is usually a few hundred acres in size) in Drumgooland, CLonduff and neighboring parishes. The map is about 20 km east-west and about 20 km north-south (each square is 1 km).
The name King is strongly concentrated in eastern Drumgooland principally in Legannany, Derryneill, Leitrim, Ballymaginaghy and Ballymagreehan. McGinn has its largest concentration just to the southwest in the townland of Islandmoyle. There is a further concentration just to the southwest. The variant Maginn does not have its own territory but appears to be along the edge of the strong concentartion of Kings. Mackin has little overlap with King and appears mainly along the road going northwest to banbridge and then northeast to Belfast.
The name Mackin has little overlap with King [a possible reason for this will be offered below]. Mackin did not occur at all in Drumgooland, Kilmegan or Kilcoo. Only in Garvaghy and Dromore are there more than two occurrences of each names. Of course this describes the situation in 1863; it is possible that there was greater overlap between the two names 30 years earlier at the time of the Tithe Applotment when the Kings were still in Ireland. [Macklin does exist in Down but it is even less common than Mackin].
There was no overlap between King and McGinn. In Drumgooland there were 45 Kings and no McGinns and in the neighboring parish of Clonduff the situation was reversed with 19 McGinns and no Kings. The reason for this appears to be that King is an angicisation of McGinn and in one parish the change was made and in the other it was not.
Robert Bell in Book of Ulster Surnames notes that "King is among the 40 most common names in England and many, perhaps a majority, in Ulster will be of this origin." He further notes that some Irish Gaelic names particularly thos with the root ri (king) have been anglicised to King. He also notes that "Mag Fhinn ... became MacGinn in Co. Tyrone and Maginn in Antrim and Down. The earlier form MacKinn is now rare having become King." Why the name was changed in one parish but not in the neighboring one likely lies in sociocultural reasons.
The Ordance Survey carried out an extensive survey of Ireland from 1834 to 1836. The results were never published until the 1980s when the volumes for the 6 northern counties were published; the unbound originals for the 26 southern counties still exist in manuscript form. Among other sociocultural information there are estimates of the predominant religions in each parish. The parishes of Clonallen, Kilbroney, Kilmegan, Kilkeel, and Kilcoo were predominantly Catholic. Drumgooland and Garvaghy were about half Catholic and half Presbyterian. In the northern Parishes near Belfast there were few Catholics. It is in the predominantly Catholic parishes where McGinn is common and in the mixed areas King predominates. The variants Maginn and Mackin also occur predominantly in the mixed areas. After the coming of English and Scottish settlers to northern Ireland in the early 1600s, it became common to anglicise names; thus McGowan became Smith and Brannagh became Welsh or Walsh. In areas with greater English influence the pressure was greatest. In Drumgooland where there were large numbers of Presbyterians McGinn likely became King (or the intermediate forms of Maginn or Mackin).
The topographical map of Ireland shows the reason for the patterns in religions. The Catholic areas are in the Mountains of Mourne. This pattern was typical of the 17th and 18th century plantations of English and Scottish settlers; the Plantations were established in the better land in the low lands and the native Catholics were pushed onto the most marginal land. Those Catholics who stayed among the (mostly) Presbyterians were more likely to Anglicise their name from McGinn to King.
In summary, it seems most likely that the Kings originated in the south central part of County Down. Based strictly on numbers Drumgooland Parish is most likely. King and Maginn overlap in one or two Townlands in Drumgooland Parish which makes them the prime candidates. However the overlapping of the names King and Mackin in Dromore and Garvaghy suggest those parishes. These latter two parishes are also only a few miles from Antrim which might be the reason for that county being remembered as a possible place of origin. King and Maginn also occurred in Shankhill Parish, a suburb of Belfast, which straddles the Down/Antrim border.
The only way to resolve this issue would be to find records in Ireland. Unfortunately there are very few Catholic records before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. For example, in the Shankhill parish, which is the only parish in Antrim which seems a possible candidate for the Kings to have come from, the earliest Catholic records date from 1850. There are two Catholic churches in Drumgooland, one in Leitrim and one in Gargarry. The records in Leitrim begin in 1827 and in Gargarry in 1832 records. Owen King and Mary Ann McGinn were likely married in 1826 (according to a note in the 1861 Canada Census) and their children were all born by 1833. There are no entries in either the Leitrim or Gargarry church records which match the information we have Owen and his children. Thus it seems unlikely that they were from Leitrim church but they still could have been from Gargaryy. It is also possible they came from a neighboring parish where records don't begin till 1850 in general.
Since it now appears unlikely that we will find any documentary
evidence of where the Kings came from in Ireland, we are left with
one possiblility: DNA. A greatgrandson of the original Owen King,
another Owen (b 1910), also married a McGinn whose ancestors came
from Down. Tests now exist which can establish if two people have a
common male ancestor (using information from the Y-chromosome). If
it turned out that male Kings and male McGinns in Canada had a
common ancestor this would strongly suggest that King indeed is a
variant of McGinn and that they came from the same area in south
central Down.
Back to the King Family History Page.