Septs
February 17, 2025 2026-04-27 22:26Septs
SEPTS
the scattered lines of the O’Dubhda family
Four branches of the family put down roots in different parts of Ireland and the world. Each kept its own spelling, its own stories, and its own memory of a shared origin in Tír Fhiachrach Muaidhe.
A sept is a historical branch of a clan — a line of descent that split from the main body of the family for reasons of geography, politics, or war, and thereafter kept its own identity while remembering the common root.
For the O’Dubhda, the septs are the product of what Mac Hale (1990) called The Scattering: the long unravelling of the clan's seat in Tireragh between the fall of the Gaelic order at Kinsale in 1601 and the Famine-era collapse of the last Catholic O’Dowda estates in 1854. Each sept took a different road out of Tireragh, and each in time took a different anglicised spelling of the old name.
Belonging to a sept is a matter of birthright and historical interest, not organisation. Within the modern clan, Houses are the administrative units — organised by present-day country or region. A person can belong to both: a sept looks to where your family came from, a House to where it lives now.
Four branches can be traced with documentary evidence: the Bonniconlon O’Dowdas (the senior line), the Dublin Dowds (Mac Hale's Sliocht Aodha), the Kerry Doodys, and the Mayo O’Dowds of the Killeaden line. Each is set out below in turn. Other branches almost certainly existed — we welcome submissions.
A sept is where your line came from — a matter of descent and history. A House is where your line lives and organises now — the modern administrative unit of the clan.
A member can — and usually does — belong to both. About Houses →
The Four Known Septs
In order, the senior line first — then the scattering, chronologically.
The Bonniconlon O’Dowdas
The senior surviving line. In 1656 David O’Dowda — heir to the main O’Dubhda estates in Tireragh — married Dorothy O’Dowd, a granddaughter of Donal of Ardnaglass. In the same year the Cromwellian government transplanted them to an estate at Bonniconlon, Co. Mayo, on lands which had formerly belonged to their own ancestors and which for a time were known as ODowdastown.
For the next two centuries the family held it as one of the few Catholic landowning families left in Ireland. The head of the line was known simply as The O’Dowda, being the direct heir in law to the ancestral estate.
Three of David and Dorothy's sons fought for King James II in the War of the Two Kings — the eldest, said to have been over seven feet tall, was slain at the Boyne in 1690; his brother James fell at Aughrim the following year, his sword still clenched in a hand so swollen that the guard had to be filed off before it could be disengaged; a third brother, Tadhg Riabhach, was listed as a Jacobite outlaw in 1691 and joined the Wild Geese, dying an officer of the French army in 1737.
The line's most famous son was Colonel Baron James Vippler O’Dowda, godson of the Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who inherited the estate in 1788. He led two hundred men to join the Franco-Irish rising of 1798, held command at Killala, fought at Collooney and Ballinamuck, was said to have been proposed as President of Connacht, and was hanged by government troops after the surrender.
His grandson Thady was forced to sell the estate in 1854. Through the Famine he had reduced his tenants' rents to help them survive; by the end there was nothing left of the family's share to hold on to. It is tempting, as Mac Hale put it, to speculate on whether a Lord Tireragh might now sit in the House of Lords had Irish history developed differently.
Spelling: This is the line that carried the O’Dowda spelling — closest to the old written Ó Dubhda. The Dowda variant (prefix dropped) is its diaspora-era form.
- Col. Baron James Vippler O’Dowda — commanded at Killala, 1798; hanged after Ballinamuck.
- Brendan O’Dowda — the Irish tenor; descends from John Taaffe O’Dowda, son of Thady.
- The Stephens line — through Catherine O’Dowda's marriage to Charles Stephens, a Dublin stockbroker; descendants continue in Ireland and abroad.
Fuller family trees for each sept are a long-term project — submissions welcome.
The Dublin Dowds
The oldest of the scattered branches. In the mid-fifteenth century, Aodh Ó Dubhda was on the losing side of a leadership struggle in Tireragh. By 1452 the Sliocht Ruairí had taken the lands of his immediate family, and Aodh fled east to the English Pale, settling first near Drogheda and later in Dublin. He registered a sworn affidavit in Dublin listing the lands he had lost — a legal claim his descendants never returned to enforce. His line, which Mac Hale calls Sliocht Aodha, became Dublin merchants and landowners.
Three names survive in the civic record. Alderman John Dowd petitioned the King in 1626 on behalf of the merchants of Dublin. Francis Dowd was elected Sheriff of Dublin and Master of City Works in 1627. A third descendant sat as an MP at the Confederation of Kilkenny during the 1640s. Under the Cromwellian settlement these Catholic Dublin Dowds also lost ground, and from that point the line begins to surface mostly in exile records and emigration lists.
One of the most consequential of those emigrations was Henry Dowd, who sailed to America in 1639. Several generations later, a descendant of his Connecticut line was Mamie Geneva Doud — better known as Mamie Doud Eisenhower, First Lady of the United States.
Spelling: This line carried the prefix-dropped forms Dowd and in emigration records Dowds; the American branch anglicised further as Doud.
- Alderman John Dowd (fl. 1626) — Dublin civic leader.
- Francis Dowd — Sheriff of Dublin and Master of City Works, 1627.
- Henry Dowd — emigrated to America, 1639.
- Mamie Doud Eisenhower (1896–1979) — First Lady of the United States; descendant of Henry's Connecticut line.
Mac Hale counts this branch a fifth major sliocht alongside the four Connacht lines of the Great Book of Lecan.
The Kerry Doodys
Tadhg Buí O’Dubhda, inaugurated on Cnoc na Cairge in 1595, was the last reigning chief of the clan. He fought in the Nine Years' War, marched south with Red Hugh O’Donnell, and survived the disaster at Kinsale in 1601. He did not return to Tireragh.
Mac Hale records the tradition that he settled in Kerry, where over generations his family's name anglicised as Doody. Kerry Doody families are documented from the seventeenth century onwards but the fuller genealogy has not yet been traced from contemporary records.
The Kerry line is the thinnest documented of the four septs, and is a natural target for the emerging DNA work: a confirmed y-chromosome match between a Kerry Doody and a documented Tireragh O’Dowd would close a four-hundred-year gap in the family's own record.
Spelling: Doody, and — rarely — Duddy. (A separate Ulster Duddy line, descended from the Cinél Eoghain, is not related to this sept.)
The deeper Kerry line awaits its genealogist.
Families with a Kerry Doody tradition and an interest in DNA testing are especially welcome.
The Mayo O’Dowds
When the Cromwellian government transplanted the surviving O’Dubhda families in 1656, Donal — brother of the last Taoiseach — was settled in the parish of Killeaden, Co. Mayo. His descendants took the surname O’Dowd, and in the following centuries spread through Swinford, Castlebar, Belfast, and Louisburgh, where careful family records have been kept.
The most public figure of the line was James Klyne O’Dowd (1802–1879), a Castlebar barrister who clashed with Daniel O’Connell during the 1835 Mayo election campaign. O’Connell wrote to Archbishop John Mac Hale from London that “the only reason I had to entertain the least apprehension was from seeing the published proceedings of Mr. O’Dowd and others, who, at this distance, appeared to me to be placing themselves in the attitude to do mischief.” One of his sons was later knighted by Queen Victoria.
A parallel figure from the same generation, Tadhg Riabhach O’Dowd, had served with distinction in the Connacht army of the 1641 rebellion, reaching lieutenant-colonel before the surrender at Ballymote in 1652. The Annals of the Four Masters records that James Klyne was probably descended from his line.
Spelling: This is the line that carried the O’Dowd spelling. The Dowd (prefix dropped) and Dowds (pluralised) variants are later diaspora forms of the same name.
- Tadhg Riabhach O’Dowd — lieutenant-colonel, Connacht army of 1641; surrendered at Ballymote, 1652.
- James Klyne O’Dowd (1802–1879) — Castlebar barrister; exchanged fire with Daniel O’Connell in the 1835 Mayo election.
- Sir — O’Dowd — his son, knighted by Queen Victoria.
Family papers from Swinford, Castlebar, Belfast and Louisburgh survive and are a rich local source.
More septs may yet come to light
The four branches above are the ones for which documentary evidence survives — chiefly through Mac Hale's 1990 history and the pedigrees of Mac Firbis and John O’Donovan. Oral tradition and emerging DNA evidence strongly suggest other cadet lines almost certainly scattered in the same period.
If your family has a documented — or strongly-held — tradition of descent from the O’Dubhda of Tír Fhiachrach, we would be glad to hear it. We are especially interested in lines preserved only in family memory, and in families willing to participate in y-chromosome DNA testing that could confirm a branch the written record has forgotten.
A sept is recognised here when its descent can be traced, with reasonable confidence, back to the Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe line. New septs added to this page are welcome — and expected.
Continue Your Journey
A Note from the Clan
These pages are volunteer-authored. We've tried to ground every claim in the historical record — Mac Hale's 1990 clan history, Mac Firbis's genealogies, O’Donovan's 1844 edition of the Annals — but a living family is always larger than the surviving paper.
If you descend from one of the septs above, or know of a branch we have not yet written up, we'd love to hear from you — get in touch.
