Conway History
Conway, in spite of its English or Welsh appearance, is a true Gaelic surname. It looks more Irish as MacConaway, the form used in some parts of Donegal and north Connacht. Conway is the anglicized form of several different Irish surnames and the resultant confusion is very difficult to ucidate, particularly as the prefixes O and Mac have been used in some places indifferently with this name. MacConway was the usual form in Co. Donegal in the seventeenth century and is extant there to-day. However, I have discovered no sept of MacConway belonging to Donegal. There was one in the adjacent County of Sligo, where the name Conway is still found: they were located in the parish of Easky; but these are O'Conway not MacConway being O Conbhuidhe in Irish which is alternatively anglicized Conboy. Nearby in Co. Mayo we have the sept of O'Conmhachain, of the same stock as the O'Haras, whose name, first anglicized as O'Conoghan etc. and later Kanavaghan, has now been corrupted to Conway and sometimes Convey. Mayo accounts for about twenty-five per cent of all the Conway births registered in Ireland. MacConway, in Irish MacConmheadha or MacConnmhaigh, belongs properly to Thomond, where the MacConways were a sept of importance up to the end of the fourteenth century: they were among the septs which rallied to O'Brien's standard in 1317. In 1360 the death of Gillananaev O'Connmhaigh (The Four Masters use the prefix O not Mac), described as chief professor of music in Thomond is recorded. As regards the derivations of these surnames it has been suggested to me by Dr. M.A. O'Brien, Director of the School of Celtic, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, that Connmhaigh comes from old Irish condmach meaning head-smashing. Conbhuidhe is probably from cu buidhe, yellow hound. The Conways in King James's Irish Army were of Welsh extraction: their family is credited with the prefix Mac in error. Two O'Conways were Bishops of Kilmacduagh in the early fifteenth century; and Father Richard Conway (1586-1623), was one of the intrepid Jesuits who did so much to promote the counter-reformation in Ireland. One of the Conways of Connacht, Roderick William Conway (1782-1853), was a prominent advocate of Catholic Emancipation but fell out with Daniel O'Connell. Thomas Conway (1735-1800), second Count Conway, was one of the many distinguished Irish exiles who rose to High military rank - he became a Major-General, Governor of all the French possessions in India and also a general in the American War of Independence. This family, of which several were distinguished soldiers, was of Cloghane and Glenbehy, Co. Kerry. It should not be confused with the Anglo-Irish family of Conway (Barons Conway), who unlike so many of the "ascendancy", were notable for the fact that they were landlords who were of the improving type and not absentees, particularly in the latter half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
