Hegarty family history
I wrote this article for a family newsletter.

The Hegarty Name in History
The name Hegarty is an English spelling of the Gaelic name O hEigcertaigh, which means "unjust." Haggerty, Hagerty and Heggarty are just different spellings of the same Gaelic name. Back in the very olden days, the O hEigcertaigh clan was from the north of Ireland, and there are still a lot of them in Derry and Donegal. In the 1600s, however, one branch of the clan moved south to County Cork; that is the group from which we are descended. I'm using the term "clan" loosely. In technical terms, the O hEigcertaigh sept, or family group, was a subgroup of the larger Donegal- and Derry-based Cenel Eoghain (i.e., Clan Owen), themselves descendants of the Ulster Ui Nialls (O'Neils). But all that clan stuff goes way back to the High Kings of Ireland and gets very mythological and speculative. The main point is the Hegarty family is from County Cork, but has ancient roots in the north of Ireland.

19th-century Cork
In tracing our own branch of the Hegarty family, I have only got back as far as the Famine years (1840s). My earliest known Hegarty ancestor was John Hegarty, a laborer who lived in Cork. There is an oral tradition that his three sons -- Michael, Jeremiah, and John -- all emigrated to the United States, and that John Jr. went West and was never heard from again. The problem with this oral tradition is that it is a standard folklore explanation for how farflung families came to share the same surname, and is not very reliable. I have no indication at all that Michael Hegarty emigrated anywhere.

I do know that Michael Hegarty, the son of John, was still in Cork in 1866, because that is when he married a servant girl named Ellen Cronin. Michael and Ellen had fifteen children, six of whom survived to adulthood. The six surviving children were John, Cornelius, Julia, Lena, Elizabeth, and Nora. Cornelius and Elizabeth remained in Ireland. Cornelius married and had ten children. Elizabeth Hegarty married a man named Michael Phipps. They had a son, but Elizabeth died giving birth to their second child. The rest of Michael Hegarty's surviving children emigrated to the United States around the turn of the century. The girls all married -- Lena married twice -- and had children. Julia and Nora moved with their families to New York.

John Hegarty 1867-1947
The emigrant son, John, was my great-grandfather. After attending the Christian Brothers school in Cork, John Hegarty joined the Royal Munster Fusilliers and served in India and South Africa. (There were other Hegartys in the RMF during these Victorian times, but I haven't figured out how they are related yet.) In 1890, after leaving the RMF, John emigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Five years later, in St. Joseph's Church, he married a servant girl named Margaret Teresa Deasy, of Somerville, MA, originally from Kilmurray in County Cork. Margaret was the sister of John's friend Jim Deasy, who introduced them after bringing his sister over from Ireland. John got a job at the Cambridge Electric company where he worked from 1895 until his retirement. The Hegartys lived in Cambridge until 1929, when they moved to Brighton. They had nine children: Ellen, Honora, Michael, Teresa, James, Margaret, Joseph, William, and Francis.

All of John Hegarty's children married and had their own kids except for Ellen (aka Helen) and James. Michael Hegarty (1898-1970) followed in his father's footsteps by working at Cambridge Electric. He married Agnes Murphy (1902-1984) of Cambridge, MA and eventually became my grandfather. In the picture below, that is my grandfather on the far right, posing with some friends.