Mulroys of Mayo

TGS:

I found this site which indicates that Mulroy and O'Malley are not connected. I will contact one of our volunteers who is very knowledgeable with Mayo surnames.

Roger McDonnell

https://www.houseofnames.com/mulroy-family-crest

As Roger indicated, the surnames O'Malley (in Irish, Ó Máille) and Mulroy/O'Mulroy (in Irish, Ó Maolruaidh) are distinct.  The O'Malley surname originated in West Mayo, and is still prominent there.  So far as I know, O'Mulroy is an East Mayo name (there is also an unrelated family with the same surname in County Longford).  One of my grandmothers grew up in the parish of Killasser in East Mayo, and she had two Mulroy great-aunts living there (they were sisters, who married two brothers - both uncles of my great-grandfather).  They and my grandmother all lived in the townland of Callow in that parish, in a sub-townland called Corthoonduff.  I've done a lot of genealogical research in the area, and the surname Mulroy is fairly common there.

It would not, however, be odd for you also to have connections to the O'Malley's.  Although my grandmother and grandfather both grew up in East Mayo, I have a number of DNA matches with people from the western part of the county and also from Galway and other nearby counties, including a few O'Malley matches (though I don't know the connection there).  Although many people migrated to Mayo in the 17th century, when the Plantation of Ulster occurred, there are many families (like the O'Malley's and the O'Mulroy's) which  have probably been there for more than a thousand years, so intermarriage among those families definitely occurred.

In case you're interested, the surname name Ó Maolruaidh means "descendant of the red-haired chief", whereas Ó Máille likely means "descendant of Malley".  Interestingly, O'Malley is one of only a few "O" surnames from which the "O" was rarely dropped when names were anglicized, but if you see people named Melia in your research, that is one of the ways that O'Malley was sometimes anglicized.  Ó Maolruaidh was anglicized in many ways.  O'Mulroy is the most common, but Milroy and even Munroe sometimes occurred.