Madam, – When the Obama heritage centre gets started in Moneygall, I hope it will devote at least as much effort to shedding light on Fulmouth Kearney’s antecedents as on his American descendants.
His surname shows that he came of martial Gaelic stock: ceatharnach means a footsoldier, an outlaw or possibly (according to Dineen) a bully or tyrant. Happily, the American cousins turned out peaceable.
How did he come to be called Fulmouth? Is it a corruption of Falmouth, perhaps because a Cornish immigrant married into the Kearneys a generation or two earlier? Or did his parents hope that the name Fulmouth would ensure that their son would always be well-fed? How in fact did the family fare in the famine?
Or one could imagine that he was so named in memory of a much earlier Kearney who had been dubbed Foul-mouth, not for any bad language but because, in the best Gaelic tradition, he was kicked out of Moneygall for composing scurrilous satires on his betters. “Feall-bhéal Ó Ceatharnaigh” sounds like an ancestor anyone might be proud of! – Yours, etc,