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January 2022

McCandless surname page

Can you explain to me were you are getting your information from that McCandless is a name of Scottish origin? The first recorded instance of the surname McCandless I can find in the Scottish census records is from 1861. And it is one single instance. The name McCandless and its derivatives have been in use from 1000 years prior in Ireland. The only places I can find online that claims it to be a name of Scottish origin are the kinds of websites that sell Scottish tat and fake tartans and coats of arms to Americans. The earliest form of McCandless available in the Irish census records is from the 1831 census and there's 12 recorded instances, mostly from the Coleraine area. I'm descended from those McCandless's. With the earliest example of the name being an Irish abbot, how is it a name of Scottish origin? If anything, it was a name taken to Scotland with the movement of people between the kingdom of Dal Riada and onwards (and I still live in a place that was part of Dal Riada). I have found absolutely no evidence to confirm that the name is in anyway a name of Scottish origin. Its.bjallenby (talk) 12:18, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@Its.bjallenby: This is a whole lot of stuff to cover. I'm going to break it down into numbered points.
  1. I don't consider the McCandless (surname) article to be "finished". It needs a lot of work on both Scottish and Irish sourcing (including sources mentioned below). That is mostly done in libraries (and genealogy libraries at that), not online. Most of the sources are not going to be found online. However, the fact that you can find weak sources online doesn't tell us anything about the strength of other sources, online or not, nor about the nature of the claim. Anyway, I will get to it over time, but have been working on the Ó Cuindlis article first.
  2. The main source for this sort of thing on the Scottish side is Black, George F. (1946). The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning, and History. New York Public Library. pp. 131, 464. It uses much more than census records. The name, under numerous anglicized spellings, is common to at least as early as the 17th century in Wigtownshire and thereabouts. This was during the extended Plantation of Ulster, leading into the Lowland Clearances, and pre-dating the Jacobite Risings and the Highland Clearances, all of which are events that pushed Scots into Ulster (mostly what is now Northern Ireland).
  3. The exact spelling McCandless and close variants like McCandles, McCanless, McAndless are best regarded as Scots-Irish, i.e. as both Scottish and Northern Irish. We don't have any reason to think the Gaelic patronymic form wasn't in use throughout this whole area going back to Dál Riata (I think that's a point we agree on), since the given name dates back to at least the 8th century. However, we don't have any secondary sources making this point explicitly. The closest we get is Black saying that the Gaelic patronymic forms like mac Cuindlis and mac Cuindleas would have first been used in Ireland. Black's point doesn't in any way prove continual use of it in the exact McCandless form in Ireland. It's probable but not proven. It's also certain that McCandless in particular was re-imported to N. Ir. from Scotland, whether it had already been in use in N. Ir. or not.
  4. Aside: None of these "Mc" shenanigans appear to relate in any way to the history of Ó Cuindlis and its anglicized derivates (Conlisk, Cundlish, Quinlisk, etc.) in Connacht. After 30-odd years of researching this stuff I can't find a single shred of proof they are the same family. They're unrelated families that both had progenitors named Cuindles or some variant of it. (And for that matter, there's no proof all the McCandless, McCandlish, McAndless, McCanleis, etc., etc. families are directly related either; for all we know there might have been 5 or more Cuindlis fellows whose mac Cuindlis patronymic sons later gave rise to Mc[Something] surnames, but this isn't a discussion for Wikipedia.)
  5. The main sources on the Irish side for surname stuff are:
    MacLysaght, Edward (1997) [1957]. The Surnames of Ireland (6th ed.). Dublin: Irish Academic Press. pp. 35, 36, 252.
    Woulfe, Patrick (1922). Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall – Irish Names and Surnames. Vol. II. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son. pp. 68, 91, 93. (The 1923 edition would be better, but I have yet to get my hands on it.)
    They both record the existence of McCandless in Ulster without any dating of it historically. By contrast, the history of Ó Cuindlis is well known to the 14th century. Neither source precludes McCandless having been largely imported to N. Ir. from Scotland (nor it having pre-existed in N. Ir.; we simply don't know).
  6. To the extent you're trying to come up with an "origin theory" based on your own census-record digging, you are engaging in WP:Original research (as well as just repeating a fraction of research already done by Black, MacLysaght, and Woulfe). FWIW, my own theory is that the name was in use in both Scotland and Ireland in some overlapping anglicized forms like "McCandless" since anglicisation began, but it will take more research, and may just be unprovable. It's also pretty well-established by genealogy projects that many of the North American McCandlesses (the largest extant group of them) are from N. Ir. yet trace back further to Scotland, some in great detail. I'm skeptical these are good enough sources for WP, however, even those published in book form.
  7. Your 1831 is long after the Plantantion of Ulster and all those other events, so is not evidentiary of origin.
  8. You are mixing up old Gaelic patronymics and modern anglicised surnames. The statement "The name McCandless and its derivatives have been in use from 1000 years prior in Ireland" is just patently false. Gaelic patronymics like mac Cuindlis and dynastics like Ó Cuindlis have been in use throughout the Gaelic-speaking world for 1000+ years, inclucing Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. This tells us nothing about where and when particular anglicised spellings (which have only been around for a few hundred years, and which were often treated as interchangable for several centuries) arose, and what the relationships between them are.
  9. You are also mixing up personal and family names. The existence of the Gaelic given name Cuindles in Ireland since the 8th c. is meaningless in this discussion. All Gaelic names first arose in Ireland, by definition, since Gaelic spread from Ireland to Scotland and IoM, not the other way around. (Names unique to Scotland and unattested in Ireland are of Norse, Anglo-Saxon, or other origin and are not natively Gaelic.) This tells us nothing about when and where a particular anglicisation of a post-patronymics surname appeared.
  10. Coleraine doesn't even faintly surprise me. It's firmly within the area of the Plantion of Ulster, and is right on the cusp of early private colonisation efforts and subsequent official plantation, so it may well have been Scot-colonized twice back-to-back. That said, none of the major sources on surnames in Ireland say anything about Coleraine in particular, so you again appear to be engaging in original research. (It may well be entirely correct in finding a family cluster of McCandlesses in Coleraine, but reliable secondary sources are not telling us this.)
  11. In short, you are confusing "McCandless is a surname of Scotland and Northern Ireland" for a claim that "Cuindles is a name of Scottish origin", but those two claims have nothing in common, and the second cannot logically be derived from the first (and is not correct, while the first clearly is).
 — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  22:18, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

The existence of the name Cuindles in Ireland since the 8th century is highly relevant when "Mac Cuindleas" is derived from it. Monastery towns were population centres and abbots were marrying and having children during those times. Relatives and descendants of Cuindles would have used his and variations of his name. Clonmacnoise was just one of many large Monastery settlements across Ireland. Unless you've got a Scottish Cuindlis spiderman meme pointing at the Irish one, the name and all the derivatives of it, regardless of what you claim, with the evidence we do actually have is of Irish origin. But clearly I've pissed in a pot I shouldn't have and I really couldn't be bothered arguing the fucking toss about it. Its.bjallenby (talk) 22:44, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I've already addressed all this above. In short, we know that Cuindles and variants of this given name were used among Gaelic speakers since the 8th century. We also know that patronymics were used since before that time and up to the early modern era (throughout Gaeldom, including both Ireland and Scotland). And we also know that these were rather randomly anglicized over the last several hundred years and became non-patronymic surnames. We have no idea where the specific anglicization "McCandless" first appeared or when. We have reliable sources putting it in Ulster and in Scotland from the early modern period onward, and we have earlier data for Scotland than for N. Ir., plus what amounted to a long-term Scottish invasion of N. Ir. Our article doesn't even go into that, nor the fact that we actually have no evidence of "McCandless" as a specific spelling existing in Ireland at all until after the Plantation. Rather than go in circles with you again, I'm going to just address the elephant in the room: you're clearly bothered by Scotland being mentioned at the article at all, yet Black (1946) establishes that it's correct, just as MacLysaght and Woulfe show it also correct for N. Ir. The matter has simply been sourced beyond anyone's ability to sweep Scotland under the rug or otherwise engage in a false dichtomy. The article itself needs all these sources directly in it, and I'll get to it when I'm done with Ó Cuindlis.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  23:24, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

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Template:Taxobox/core/sandboxMOS

 
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I assume Template:Taxobox/core/sandboxMOS isn't needed any longer. If so, you might care to flag it for deletion. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:17, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

You've create also Template:Taxobox/Status sandbox, is it not needed anymore? Gonnym (talk) 16:21, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Nominated for deletion.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  10:01, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

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Hello, SMcCandlish. I noticed that when you took part in Template talk:Committed identity topicon#RfC 8 January 2022, that your signature does not conform to WP:SIGIMAGE. It is not my job to enforce the no images in signature policy, nor will I forward this matter. I just wanted to let you know in case someone else raises an issue over it. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 19:44, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Update: Confused that your signature passed the Signatures check tool, I found my answer at User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF)#Help with signatures: your images are considered Unicode characters. Please disregard my message; sorry about that. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 20:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

No worries.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  09:25, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

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