From Virginia to Mayo: An American lawyer and the Norman lords of old

When Patrick C. Jordan started looking into his family roots, he didn’t expect to end up steeped in muck in a field outside Straide, standing beside the crumbling remains of a 13th-century castle.

From his home in the States, he had only meant to trace a few records, a marriage certificate, some family names, but one discovery led to another, then another and a simple genealogy hobby became something much greater.

Before long, the American lawyer found himself deep in a story that stretched back 800 years, to the Norman invasion of Connaught and the rise of a powerful Mayo dynasty that once ruled much of the land between Foxford and Ballyhaunis.

The result of that search is his new book, The Rise, Fall and Aftermath of the Gaelicized Norman-Irish Lordship: The Jordans (Mac Siurtáin) of County Mayo, Ireland.

“I just wanted to know where we came from,” it was a noble pursuit to honour his late father’s legacy by unearthing the families Irish roots, then it grew legs.

“I had a marriage record for Peter Jordan and Bridget Fox from 1834, in Crossmolina parish and that was it. But as soon as I started digging, I realised there was this whole world of history sitting behind the Jordan name.”

That curiosity became an obsession. Between his day job negotiating energy contracts in the states, Patrick devoted his spare time poring over maps, parish registers and 17th-century land records.

He read the Annals of the Four Masters, studied John O’Hart’s Irish Pedigrees, and followed every mention of the Jordan or Mac Siurtáin families he could find.

Eventually, the research brought him across the Atlantic. He walked the ruins at Ballylahan Castle, stopped by the Michael Davitt Museum in Straide, and traced the old Jordan country that once ran across east Mayo. Jordan also made a trip to the butt of Ne

“It was surreal,” he says. “Standing in the same place my ancestors had lived eight centuries earlier.”

The story Jordan uncovered begins in the 1200s, when Norman soldiers followed Richard de Burgo into Connacht. Among them was a knight called Jordan de Exeter, whose descendants settled in what’s now Mayo.

Over generations they built castles, intermarried with local Gaelic families, and slowly became more Irish than Norman. “They spoke Irish, they lived by Gaelic laws, they fought alongside their neighbours,” Jordan says. “They became part of the country.”

But that blending of cultures wouldn’t last forever.

By the late 1500s, English control was expanding westward. Elizabeth I introduced the “surrender and regrant” system, rish chiefs were forced to hand their lands to the Crown and receive them back under English law.

“The idea was to make Ireland easier to tax and to weaken the old lordships,” Jordan explains. “Families like the Jordans signed up thinking they were protecting themselves, but it ended up being their undoing.”

Powerful English-aligned families such as the Dillons used the policy to seize vast estates across Mayo. Within a century, the old Norman-Irish landowners had been stripped of almost everything.

“The Jordans refused to give up their Catholic faith,” says Jordan. “They wouldn’t convert to the Church of Ireland, and they paid the price. They went from lords of the land to tenants. That’s where my people came from, the ones who later left for America.”

For Jordan, who spent years practising law in Washington DC, the project eventually became something more than straightforward research on his family tree.

His book tells that story in rich detail, from medieval battles to Cromwell’s confiscations, right up to the 19th-century emigration that carried his family name across the Atlantic.

“I found that history doesn’t really die,” he says. “You can still feel it in the fields, in the ruins, even in the local names.”

Jordan plans to become a regular visitor to Mayo and recently gave a talk in Ballyhaunis.

He felt it important to meet locals who’ve helped with his research. For him, it’s a homecoming of sorts.

“Every time I visit, it feels like closing a circle,” he says. “You realise the past isn’t gone it’s right there in front of you, hidden in the landscape.”

Patrick C. Jordan’s book, The Rise, Fall and Aftermath of the Gaelicized Norman-Irish Lordship: The Jordans (Mac Siurtáin) of County Mayo, Ireland, is available online and in select Mayo bookshops.

It is available online via this link.