Rotten roots: the colonial genealogies of Irish enslavers

This article reinterprets Irish links to Atlantic slavery as a problem of kinship, inheritance, and family memory. It focuses in particular on genealogy as a technology of memory within enslaver families. Responding to a call from Calvert and O’Riordan (2024) to produce ‘messier’ Irish family histories, the article argues that genealogy functions as a familial technology through which households curate status, manage embarrassment, and negotiate morally difficult pasts. After situating ‘geneticised’ and affiliative identities within Irish diasporic narratives, the article develops a microhistorical case study of the Daly family of Galway and Jamaica and the MacEvoys of Denmark and St. Croix. Using family-produced genealogies, estate papers, emancipation compensation records, account books, it reconstructs how slave-derived wealth was converted into Irish landed property, ecclesiastical patronage, and intergenerational social mobility. The article further examines architecture and material culture as forms of inherited memory, showing how buildings, interiors, and landscapes preserved the social and economic legacies of Atlantic slavery in Ireland. The analysis shows how successive Daly genealogies domesticated colonial violence by emphasising land reacquisition and Catholic respectability while minimising slaveholding and interracial intimacies. By placing the descendants of the enslaved alongside the descendants of enslavers, it shows how genealogy can both reproduce silences and recover occluded histories of coercive relationships within the ‘Irish family.’ Methodologically, the article integrates family archives with imperial and digital genealogical sources to track the transmission of wealth, reputation, and silence across generations.