What I said was: >If you enter Hegarty in the IrelandOldNews.com search engine, you will >get 32 pages of hits, not necessarily from Cork. Based on death notices >from Irish newspapers, Hagerty with an A is more commonly spelled with >two Gs, as Haggerty. When spelled with an E, it's always with one G, as >Hegarty. hagerdonngenealogy@earthlink.net responded: >Denis, during the 10 years I've been doing genealogical research on my >family, I've found that Hegarty is probably the correct spelling in >Ireland of my family name (It has always been phonetically the correct >pronunciation) and while there are more people with the spelling of >Haggerty in America than Hagerty or Hegarty, that I've found was the http://tiara.ie/obframe.htm lists way more Hegartys than Hagertys. All I was suggesting was that in the case of spellings beginning with "Ha" it is almost always spelled with two Gs. Variations between Ireland and the U.S. are quite common. For example, O'Keeffe in Ireland almost always becomes O'Keefe in the U.S. >I checked the spelling on Haggerty on the website you mentioned and came >up with only one and it appeared to be someone living in New York in 1864. http://www.irelandoldnews.com/Cork/1864/MAR.html#1 lists a Biddy Haggerty among the steerage passengers who survived the wreck of the Bohemian off Portland, Maine. >Also the number of those with the spelling of Haggerty in Ireland >are as result of someone returning to Ireland from America or Canada in >the latter 19th century. Actually, what http://tiara.ie/obframe.htm shows is that the Haggerty spelling, when appearing in a death notice, is almost always as reported in an American paper, or reported in an Irish paper of a Haggerty who died in America. Understand that this does not mean the Haggerty spelling was used in Ireland, but rather quoted verbatum from an American paper. It was a not uncommon practice for an Irish person's death notice in a U. S. paper to say "Cork papers please copy" or "Dublin papers please copy" etc. Thus an Americanized spelling of an Irish name may find its way into print in an Irish newsaper. The most important thing is to keep an open mind on spelling of surnames. I spent years searching for the Civil War record of a John Ahern who was a brother of my great-grandfather. I eventually found him recorded as John O'Harran or O'Hearn. He enlisted to go South and kill rebels, but ended up killing someone before he even got out of boot camp in Massachusetts. See http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~aherns/ahnws186.htm#25/10/1862 for details. -dja