Origin of the Name McGinty
The
McGinty family history 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 McGinty
include Maginnity, Genty, MacGenty, McEntee and Ginty. This Irish Sept was from Oriel.
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.
The name appears in the Chancery Rolls, Fiants, and Hearth Money Rolls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Counties Monaghan and Armagh. McGinty was peculiar to County Armagh and is now found in Tyrone and Fermanagh due to the migration of the family from Donegal at the time of the Plantation of Ulster . The name in Irish is Mag Fhinneachta, taken from the Gaelic word 'sneachta' meaning 'snow'.
The McGinty 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 McGinty descendants.