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The Ó Dea Clan and Surname 

          The name O'Dea (in Irish Ó Déaghaidh) is associated "almost exclusively with County Clare and areas . . . which immediately adjoin it," writes Edward MacLysaght, the foremost authority on Irish surnames. He notes that the normal pronunciation of the name in English approximates O'Day, but that "some O'Deas call themselves O'Dee" when speaking the name.
          MacLysaght adds that an "Irish variant" of the surname, Ó Diaghaidh, common to parts of Counties Tipperary and Waterford, is usually anglicized as O'Dee in both written and spoken forms.  The Dysert Ó Dea Clan Association welcomes anyone descended from these Irish ancestries, whatever contemporary spelling or pronunciation their surname has assumed.
          The ancestral seat of Clan Ó Déaghaidh is the region around Dysert Ó Dea in the barony of Inchiquin in central County Clare. In early medieval times that area was part of the Kingdom of Thomond, which embraced much of southwest and south-central Ireland.
          By the early thirteenth century, two regions on Thomond's eastern frontier--the Slieve Ardagh hills of Tipperary and the Slieverue (Sliabh Ruadh) of south Kilkenny--became home to a group or groups of O'Deas. Whether these O'Deas were warriors sent from Clare to defend east Thomond from Norman attack or whether they constitute a distinct sept remains an open question. In any case, by the end of the medieval era the Slieveardagh and Slieverue had joined Inchiquin in Clare as recognized "O'Dea country."
          Over the next five hundred years, pushed and pulled by economic and political forces of the times, members of the O'Dea Clan spread outward from those two regions to other counties of Ireland, to continental Europe, and to the Americas and Australia.
          As evidenced by Griffith's Valuation, the majority of O'Deas who had not left Ireland before the 1850's still lived in Clare or the adjacent counties of Limerick, Tipperary and Galway. Except in Clare, where the Irish root of the surname held fast, names without the Ó prefix - both Day and Dea - were common. In county Kerry across the Shannon estuary from Clare, as well as in South Tipperary and Waterford, the use of Dee and O'Dee prevailed. Smaller but significant numbers of the O'Dea Clan resided in Cork, Dublin, Laois, Offaly, Wexford and a dozen other counties by the 1850's.
          A mixture of O'Deas peopled the province of Connaught, where migrants from nearby Clare comingled with "FitzGerald O'Dea's" expelled from Kilkenny and Waterford in Cromwellian times. Whether by choice, by chance, or by conqueror's fiat some of the O'Deas in Galway and Mayo bore the English surname Godwin into the twentieth century.

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Last update: October 2006