Origin of the Name Hanahan
The ancient history of the name
Hanahan was found in the allfamilycrests.com archives. The name Hanrahan is derived from the Gaelic O'hAnrachain sept that was located in County Clare.
A sept or clan is a collective term describing a group of persons whose immediate ancestors bore a common surname and inhabited the same territory. Irish septs and clans that are related often belong to even larger groups, sometimes called tribes.
This name has a number of variants including Handrahan, Harraghan, Hourihan and Henrehen. When Gaelic names were anglicized during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were often changed to Anglo equivalents that sounded most like their original Gaelic name. Some other bearers of the name Hanrahan take their name from the O'hAnradhain sept of County Cork , that was more usually anglicized as Hourihan. In modern times this name and its variants are still mostly found in the southern and western Counties of Ireland .
The Hanahan coat of arms came into existence centuries ago. The process of creating coats of arms (also often called family crests) began in the eleventh century although a form of Proto-Heraldry may have existed in some countries prior to this. The new art of Heraldry made it possible for families and even individual family members to have their very own coat of arms, including all Hanahan descendants.