Be this, however, as it may, the ancient family of O’Quin--more fortunate than most other Irish families of noble origin--has never sunk into obscurity, or been without a representative of aristocratic rank; and it can at present boast of a representative among the nobility of the empire in the person of its justly presumed chief, the noble Earl of Dunraven.
We have thus slightly touched on the history of the O’Quins, not only as it was connected with that of the locality which we had to illustrate, but also as necessary to correct a great error into which Burke and other modern genealogists have fallen in their accounts of the origin of the name and descent of this family. Thus it is stated by those writers that “the surname is derived from Con Ceadcaha, or Con of the hundred battles, monarch of Ireland in the second century, whose grandson was called Cuinn (rather O’Cuinn), that is, the descendant of Con, when he wielded the sceptre in 254.” But those writers should not have been ignorant that Con, which literally signifies the powerful, was a common name in Ireland both in Christian and Pagan times; and still more, they should not have been ignorant of the important fact for a genealogist, that the use of surnames was unknown in Ireland till the close of the tenth century. The story is altogether a silly fiction; and as the real origin of the family appears to be now unknown even to themselves, and as their pedigree has never as yet been printed, we are tempted to give it in an English form, translated from the original, preserved in the books of Lecan and Duald Mac Firbis:--
---- Corc, who was the tutor of Murtogh O’Brien (the great grandson of Brian Boru),
---- Niall, who was henchman to Morough, the son of Brian Boru, whose fate he shared in the battle of Clontarf,
---- Conn, from whom the name is derived.”
The pedigree is carried up from this Con through eighteen generations to Cormac Cas, the son of Ollioll Oluim, and the common progenitor of all the tribes of the Dal-Cassians.
In this notice we may add, as an evidence of the ancient rank of the family, that the Irish annalists at the year 1188 record the death of Edaoin, the daughter of O’Quin, Queen of Munster, on her pilgrimage at Derry in that year. She appears to have been the wife of Mortogh O’Brien, who died without issue in 1168, and was succeeded by his brother Donald More, the last king of all Munster.