Origin of the Name Deasy
The ancient history of the name
Deasy was found in the allfamilycrests.com archives.
Over the centuries Surnames developed a wide number of variants. Different spellings of the same name can be traced back to an original root. Additionally when a bearer of a name emigrated it was not uncommon that their original name would be incorrectly transcribed in the record books at their new location. Surnames were also often altered over the years based on how they sounded phonetically and depending on the prevailing political conditions it may have been advantageous to change a name from one language to another.
Variants of the name Deasy
include Deacy, Deecy, Deecie, Deecy, Dacey, Dassey, Dacie and many others. This name Deasy is often of Irish origin and is an anglicized form of the Gaelic Déise and Déiseach sept names.
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.
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. Déise is an Irish form of the Deece family that had settled in County Meath in the twelfth century. The Gaelic name Déiseach is from County Waterford although the name is also now associated with County Cork and was anglicized as Deasy and its variants. A famous bearer of the name was Rickard Deasy (1812-1883), who pioneered the 'Deasy Land Act', one of a series of important tenant reform laws in nineteenth century Ireland . His son, Henry Hugh Peter Deasy (1866-1947), was a writer, Irish army officer and founder of the Deasy Motor Car Company in 1906. Deasy's Quay in Clonakilty in Cork is named for a successful ship-building family who became established there in the early and mid-nineteenth century.
The Deasy 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 Deasy descendants.