Irish Eyes Squinting at Cavan through Kansas
From Cavan a Cavanaugh changed into a Cavenoid.
With ancestors all from Kansas. A Kansas that’s pretty much like Cavan.
And all that is good enough reason for anybody to eat Corned Beef & Cabbage.
It’s all in the short-attention span theatre of Entropical Paradise.
This would be the first I heard of the name Kavanagh (and its other Anglicized variants) having any direct relationship to County Cavan. I understand the name to be the English version of Caomhanach, one of the very few Gaelic Irish surnames not to include “O” or “Mac”.
It means “follower of (Saint) Caomhan”, a name which is itself a diminutive of caomh, which means “gentle”. So far as I know the name originated in Carlow and Wexford mostly, but you might want to check up on all that.
County Cavan is drumlin country, those little hills that resemble a basket of eggs, or so we were taught at school. Cavan comes from Cabhán and means “hollow”, I think, which would make sense when referring to where the town, from which the county takes its name, is built.
To that end I’ve compared southeast Kansas to Cavan and Monaghan myself.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
