The Irish Palen Hypothesis As is obvious, and mentioned repeatedly on this site, the spelling of family names has been very fluid in the past and has depended on many factors: literacy, phonetics, accents, local conventions, even poor handwriting etc. This is one reason why the genetic part of this study is so important and why researching similar sounding or otherwise related surnames is essential to a complete surname study. One surname that has piqued my curiosity is Palen even though one might think it is quite distinct from Pelan. Palen is another surname of multiple and seemingly independent origins - Ireland, Wales, Netherlands, Norway-Sweden-Finland, Eastern Europe etc. So why is this so interesting to the Pelan study? 1. The first point to note that is that there are a handful of 19th century census records outside Ireland where people called Palen claim to come from Ireland. The strange thing is that the Irish records have virtually no one called Palen:
So could it be that the majority of Palens upped sticks and left Ireland and the remainder died/daughtered out? Was the spelling of their surname flexible and subsequently regularised in Ireland to something else, like Palin or maybe even Pelan? Did some people with Pelan/Palin-like names who moved abroad become regularised into Palens? 3. The third and most compelling fact is that there is a documented Pelan family also living in Ontario in the late-19th century who mysteriously turn into Palens. For example, there is a birth record of one of their sons Victor Pelan (b. 12 May 1885 in York, Ontario), father an Irishman Thomas Pelan. What makes it compelling is that the certificate is signed by Thomas as a Pelan; The entire family it seems turns into Palens within 20 years for reasons as yet unknown, e.g. Victor was calling himself Palen unambiguously on his WW1 enlistment papers in 1916.
So we can suggest that some Palens (perhaps just those in Canada?) of Irish descent came from people that were not consistently called Palen in Ireland. One family of Irish descent were definitely using the name Pelan consistently within Canada and then switched to Palen - presumably as a result of direct or indirect influence from Dutch Palens coming north from the US. Putting this circumstantial and anecdotal evidence together, the hypothesis is that some if not all "Irish" Palens are actually Pelans or are otherwise connected by a possible common origin. It would seem that only Y-chromosome testing is going to help prove this with any level of certainty - and it has! |
Surname: Pelan >