What's in a name?

Why two spellings - Harran and Harron?

The short answer is that it depends on who filled in a particular official document. I have twelve siblings. Eleven of them are recorded as Harron; the other sibling, Peter, and I were registered as Harran. Although "an" was his official name, Peter chose to stay with "on" in line with our other siblings; I chose to go with "an" and that has continued onto my own children.

This name inconsistency is not just in my generation; my great grandfather and his family are recorded in the 1901 census as Harran, in the 1901 census they are recorded as Harron.

So take your pick!

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Acknowledgements

Although I have put the tree together for this site, doing that is is some ways the easy part, the really hard part is tracking down the information in the first place. Numerous people have provided me with that information, particularly my older siblings Michael, Margaret and Pat and my cousin Margo Duddy who helped clarify family relationships and provided me with numerous personal recollections and family stories. A few individuals outside my immediate family have made considerable contributions:

• On the Barr side, I would like to thank my cousin Sheila Redden who provide a lot of information to supplement the chart hand-drawn by John Vincent Colamosca; Sheila's knowledge of the Barr connection is phenomenal. As the Colamosca chart was hand-drawn, there are likely to be errors in my transcription, especially in respect of dates. I welcome corrections that anyone can provide.


• On the French side (my Granny Harron's family), most of the details have come from Chris French whose great x2 grandfather was my granny's brother James, making him my second cousin twice removed. Chris has been working on the French family tree right back since his teenage years, knows just about everything there is to know about the family connections and he has been very generous in sharing that information. I think it is worth pointing out that much of Chris’s research was done before the advent of the Internet and the wealth of online information now available; the early days of his research involved countless hours spent with his dad Les, poring through microfiche and film.


• Éamonn O’Dochartaigh supplemented Chris’s information and set up the French Connection group on Facebook which has been a wonderful source of old photographs, tidbits of information and anecdotes about the family.