Why Peadar O’Dowd is on this page

Heritage: Peadar O’Dowd was a Bohermore-born Galwayman, an alumnus of University College Galway and a long-standing member of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society. Heritage paragraph foregrounds Galway city, Bohermore and his half-century-plus body of local history.

Peadar O’Dowd (died 3 January 2024) was an Irish local historian and author whose dozen or so books on the streets, families, churches, traders and dispossessed communities of Galway city and county made him one of the most prolific public historians of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Ireland. A native of the Bóthar Mór (Bohermore) district of Galway city, he was an alumnus of University College Galway and a long-standing member of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society. His major published works include *Old and New Galway* (1985), *Vanishing Galway* (1987), *Down by the Claddagh* (1993), *The Great Famine and the West* (2000), *In from the West: The McDonogh Dynasty* (2002), *Galway in Old Photographs* (2003), *A History of County Galway* (2004), *Christmas Tales of Galway* (2006), *Final Tales of Galway* (2009) and *Tracing Your Galway Ancestors* (2011). Together they form an indispensable companion to anyone tracing Galway lineages — including, fittingly for the directory, the western Uí Dubhda. He died on 3 January 2024.

Heritage notes

Family root: Bóthar Mór (Bohermore), Galway, Ireland — irish-born-confirmed-galway.

The directory threads Peadar O’Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.