Dan, now an O'Neill, whom I met some time after my arrival in the US in the mid fifties told me about my Uncle Jerry Riney whom he would meet whenever the ship he sailed on would dock in New York. Dan is no longer with us and neither is his sister, Mary, whose baptismal papers from Ireland has her as an O'Neill. It is all so very confusing. Perhaps, because of her brother's name name change it necessitated paperwork adjustments be made so that Dan could act as her sponsor. It was important for me to discover that the larger number of connected family members had little interest in knowing of their origin.
Name changes are evidentially traumatic as is a lack of knowledge about one's history.
Such a lack makes for a great sense of inadequacy. Then, there are those who are crippled by the stereotyping of their people and who attempt to become one with their abuser. The Rineys have been coming to America at different periods over the years beginning some thirty years after the Battle of Kinsale, is my surmisal. Their eagerness in leaving the old world was due to religious persecution. James I granted the land of Maryland to Calvert's son Leonard even with the knowledge that his father, Charles Calvert, had died.