A note from your Taoiseach about what we are quietly building together, and why I am asking the paid members to do the heavy lifting.

Some time ago I sat in a hall in Mayo and looked around at perhaps a hundred and twenty people who had travelled in from thirty countries to be there. Cousins I had never met. Names I knew from emails and never from faces. A family I had a small piece of, suddenly large in front of me.

And the thing I could not stop thinking, walking back to the hotel that night, was the count of the people who were not in that room.

The number that bothers me

We do not know exactly how many of us there are. The genealogists I have asked all give different answers because the surname has fractured across a hundred spellings – O’Dowd, O’Dowda, Dowdy, Doody, Dawdy, Doud, Duddy, Dowds. The conservative estimate is around two hundred thousand living people somewhere in the world who descend from the Uí Fiachrach Muaidhe. The aggressive estimate is half a million.

The clan, as a working organisation, has roughly three hundred and fifty active members.

That gap is the thing I want to close in my term as Taoiseach. Not all of it – that is impossible. But meaningfully. I would like the next Homecoming to be planned for a clan twice the size of the one we have today.

The bridge has to be you

We have tried advertising. We have tried the genealogy databases. We have tried Wikipedia and surname forums and direct mail. They all return the same kind of person: someone who was looking for us. Which is wonderful, but slow.

The people we are missing – the cousins who would join in a heartbeat if they knew the clan existed – those people will only ever be found one way. Someone who already knows them has to tell them.

You. Your aunt with the family album. Your cousin who married a Doody. The friend you knew in school whose mother was an O’Dowd. The boy down the road who never knew his grandfather was one of us.

The clan has never grown faster than when one of you walks one of them through the door.

So we have built you a tool

On the website, there is a new page: Build the Clan. Patrons and members of the Taoiseach’s Circle can use it to send a personal invitation to someone they know. You paste the address, tell us how they are related to you, and we send each one a heritage-styled note signed in your name. They never see a mailing list. We never buy data. The note feels personal because it is personal: it comes from you, with your relationship to them named.

If they say yes, they join as Kinfolk – the free tier of the clan, no card required. They are now in the directory. They start receiving the clan’s letters. They are invited to the next gathering.

Why only Patrons

This is a deliberate restriction and I want to be clear about why.

If anyone could send invitations through our system, the system would be flooded with spam in a week. People would scrape their LinkedIn and dump it in. Real cousins would never reply because they would assume it was junk. Our deliverability would collapse. The whole thing would die in the first month.

So we have chosen to trust the people who have already shown their commitment to the clan. If you are paying dues – Voting Member, Patron, or Taoiseach’s Circle – you have access to the invite tool. If you are not, you do not. That is not a judgement on free members. It is a statement that the people putting their own money behind the clan have already proven they are not here to spam anyone.

It also means the membership fees themselves are doing something visible: they are funding the work that the clan needs to do to find the rest of itself.

The Clan Builders board

We are tracking who is doing this work, because it deserves to be tracked.

At clan-builders you can see who is building the clan back the fastest. Each invitation earns the inviter points – one point for a friend who joins, more for a confirmed Dowd, the most for a kinsman whose ancestry you can name. The board shows two columns: the members who have converted the most family, and the members who have simply put the most outreach in. Both deserve recognition.

As your score grows, you earn standing inside the clan: Connector, Builder, and at the highest level, Patriarch or Matriarch. These are not just titles. They are visible marks beside your name in the directory and in any clan record where members are listed.

The prizes at the next Homecoming

I will be specific because vague promises are insulting.

At the next Homecoming, two years from now, we will honour the member who has done the most to grow the clan in the intervening period. That member will:

• Be named publicly at the Rally, in the clan’s record, and on the Builders’ wall on the website
• Receive a year of Patron membership on the house
• Receive a piece of clan craft that we are commissioning specifically for this purpose
• Have their name read aloud at the next inauguration, alongside the Taoisigh of the previous decades

The runners-up will not be forgotten. There will be a Builders’ wall – a permanent page on the site – with every member who reached the Connector tier (five conversions) and above.

What I am actually asking you to do

Sit down some evening with a glass of something. Open your phone’s contacts. Look for the surnames. Open your address book and look for the email domains that end in dowd or dowda or doody. Think about your cousins. Think about the friend from school whose mother was a Dowd. Think about the funeral you went to where you met three Dowds you had never seen before and exchanged business cards.

Take an hour. Send the invitations. You will not be doing this for a marketing list. You will be handing someone a door into a family they did not know they had.

And then, in two years, when we are all in Mayo together again, we will count what we have built. I would like that hall to be twice as full.

With warm regards,
Sean O’Dowda Stephens
Taoiseach

Build the Clan →  ·  See the Builders’ board →