Thomas Alfred Schaw (1585-1654), father of Donald Schaw (1625-1675), father of John Shaw/Schaw (1651-1700), father of William Shaw (1679-1730), father of Samuel Shaw (1710-1760), father to William Shaw (1790-1799), father to John Robert Shaw (1796-1875), father to Ebeneezer Shaw (1830-1912), father to Osro "Rowe" Shaw (1865-1947), father to Arlo Shaw (1917-2004), father to Robert M Shaw (1949-current), father to Robert J Shaw (1974-current), father to me, Abigail Shaw (1999-now).

Ten generations of Shaws, from Thomas Alfred Shaw of Inverness, Scotland, to John Shaw Schaw in Down, Northern Ireland, to Osro "Rowe" Shaw in Fillmore, Minnesota, to South Dakota and me.

And I am the last one.

My grandfather is an only child, my dad is an only son, and I am my dad's only child and his only daughter. I have no cousins or great aunts or uncles with my last name. The name Shaw, carried across an ocean and three centuries, ends with me, in a traditional sense. I'm all that's left, at least in the States from my particular familial line.

The ease of being able to trace paternal lines centuries back throughout history while being able to trace maternal lines much harder, unless through marriage certificates, is a prime example of how marriage as an institution has stripped women of their identities. My own family lines, both my mother's paternal line and my father's paternal line, are case studies for this very argument.

My mother's maiden name was Athey. Her mother's maiden name was LeCombe. John de Athy, the ancestor of my mom and grandpa, is documented across seven centuries with dates and places and a clear unbroken line to me. But the LeCombe line is near impossible to trace confidently. My dad's paternal line, a long line of Shaws, can be traced past the 1500s. I know where the Atheys and Shaws lived, what they did for work, who they interacted with, where they went to church, and more.

My Polish 3rd great grandmother's daughter married into the Shaw family. Beyond that, her name and place of origin is simply gone. Lost in marriage and a trip across the ocean. She was someone before her marriage, but history will never know.

Patrilineal naming structurally erases women's history. Surnames pass through fathers and sons in most Western naming traditions; every genealogical record, census documents, property deeds, church registries, was built around tracking a single consistent name across generations, the father and husband's.

When a woman marries and takes her husband's name, her maiden name and everything attached to it becomes a dead end in the historical record unless someone specifically preserved it elsewhere. This is a consequence of how the entire system of historical documentation was designed.

Coverture, while an English common law, reached marital unions across the world. The doctrine suspends a woman's legal existence outside of the identity of wife. Marriage was necessary for survival. A woman could not independently own property, sign contracts, or maintain a separate legal existence for centuries. The men were preserved, and the women were lost.

Property records, church registries, and immigration documents overwhelmingly tracked male heads of household. Women frequently appeared only as wife of or daughter of rather than as individuals with their own documented trajectory. The asymmetry in what survives in the historical record isn't because women's lives were less eventful or less worth recording, but because the entire apparatus of record keeping was built around a male centered organizing principle.

Women's individual histories were treated as secondary information, attached to and dependent on a man's name rather than standing on their own. I have always felt a level of disdain for this tradition seeping into modern practice. A 21st century father leading his daughter down the aisle at her wedding and literally handing her to her husband. Even as a kid, I insisted that if I ever got married, my dad could maybe walk me halfway down the aisle, but there would be no handing off. I am not property to be handed from one male name to another. And then every man in my family would roll their eyes, especially my little brother, and my little sisters would go, “Wait a minute. I like that…”

Hypothetical marriage plans aside, I am still a Shaw by name. Scottish, protestant. But I am also an Athey, even if not by name. Irish, Catholic.

The spelling of my family's last name changed from Schaw to Shaw in the late 1600s when John Shaw moved to Ireland. The name was anglicized, simplified, and, dare I say, Protestantized. I see that shift in spelling as a small shift in identity. It was a family altering its own identifier in an effort of self-presentation as it crossed into a new and contested territory.

While I haven't found any exact record of my family being involved in the following, the move from Scotland into Northern Ireland during this period places them within or alongside the Plantation of Ulster. As someone who grew up very Catholic, yikes! The Ulster Plantation was a British colonial settlement project in the 1600s. The idea was to deliberately place English and Scottish Protestants onto land that was taken directly from Gaelic Irish Catholics. Purposefully placing these settlers here was an effort of the Crown to anglicize the region, and it worked. This is the core of the British-Irish conflict, which I have studied for the past few years of my life.

Which means my paternal family was inside this history on the settling side.

And what would you say if my maternal family line lived the other side of this story.

I am Catholic, raised by Irish Catholics. I attended Catholic school for my entire education, preschool to twelfth grade, went to Mass every Wednesday during the school day and Sunday Mass every other Sunday with my mom. My mother's maiden name was Athey, which we've traced as far back as John de Athy who was born around 1280 in Loughrea, County Galway.

My interest in Ireland's sovereignty goes back quite a few years. I feel deep empathy for Bobby Sands, for the hunger strikers, for the Catholic nationalist cause and its centuries of grievance against British and Protestant settlement, and I always have.

Now, I've learned that not only does my bloodline run through the Irish, it also runs directly through the Protestant Scottish settlers who were part of creating the conditions for that exact grievance. I didn't choose my ancestors and I don't inherit their politics by blood, but I can't help feeling a bit of shame at such a history. It has made me wonder if my fascination with Northern Ireland isn't incidental curiosity but an inherited haunting. A subconscious pull toward a conflict my own family set in motion while the other side of my family suffered for it three hundred years ago. Now generations later, I was born to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother in South Dakota, USA.

The Scottish line of my family walked away from Ireland when they left for Minnesota in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Osro "Rowe" Shaw (1865-1947) moved to Minnesota where he had my great grandpa Arlo who I was lucky enough to know for a few years before his passing. The Shaw family crest was on the wall of the basement living room in my great grandparents house, surrounded by old-timey weapons. I remember looking at them hanging above the TV every time I watched my shows, but I don't remember ever talking about them.

I was young then, and my great grandparents have since passed, but I wonder what happened to my family's relationship to that original conflict once they left it behind entirely. The political and religious weight of Ulster Protestant identity doesn't seem to have carried forward into the American generations in any active way, other than perhaps snide remarks I heard my dad's side of the family making about the "prude rule following Catholics that thought they were better than everyone else." I always thought that was just them.

Other than that, that identity seems to have dissolved into the generic American identity the way so many immigrant family stories have. Perhaps an identity wrought with undue violence isn't one my great grandfather wanted to carry with him and admit to on new land. This all makes my own independent, undirected pull back toward Northern Ireland, or the North of Ireland depending on your persuasion, as an adult even stranger and more interesting to me. I found my way back to it on my own, possibly drawn by something in my blood that the family itself had stopped talking about generations ago.

I've always identified with my Catholic identity more than anything. It's how I was brought up. But I'm not the last Athey; I'm the last Shaw. I'm the last bearer of a name that holds such cultural history and importance. A name that was a huge part of my upbringing as well. Cue to my dad saying, "You're a Shaw", "Shaw's don't quit", and more. I am a Shaw, and I am the only and first Catholic Shaw. I follow three generations of onlies, each one a thinner and weaker thread than the last. A name carried through ten generations and three countries and several centuries of upheaval ends, in its traditional form, with a woman who writes under it but won't pass it forward the same way a son would have. Without a name, what survives a lineage?

Me being the last Shaw is in some ways awkward, a problem, an unfortunate end to a line. Again, when I was very young, I remember talking to my dad about whether I should keep my last name when I got married. I wasn't concerned for me, but more for my dad. He had always wanted a son, and a daughter was what he got. That framing in such a young mind reveals a system built on men and their sons who would carry the name forward indefinitely. A daughter being the final bearer of it exposes how contingent family history is on the male identity.

It didn't have to be this way, it was a conscious choice encoded into law and custom. Those who set these standards simply assumed continuation through male children would be enough and their views treated any deviation from that as a kind of failure rather than what it actually is, biology and circumstance refusing to cooperate with an arbitrary system. Because mother nature and the creation of life takes no notice of man-made laws.

There are some naming traditions that don't erase maternal lines as completely. Iceland and Spain have their own traditions that combine matronymic naming with patronymic naming, preserving both parents' family names across generations. Women in Western Europe created their own naming traditions, which to me present as a form of mini rebellion. My middle name being Dorothy after my great grandmother, my mother and sister sharing the middle name Marie, my step sister's middle name being her mother's first name, are all examples of women preserving themselves in the next generation. Patrilineal naming was never the only possible choice.

The recovery work along maternal lines is a choice we get to make now. I do this work as I try to find my Kashubian great-great-grandmother's actual name and trace my great grandma Dorothy LeCombe beyond her husband or dad's name. I'm determined to believe they are findable despite a system that wasn't built to make them easy to find. Maybe it's a small act of resistance against the patrilineal structure, but every woman whose name gets recovered through patient archival work is a tiny correction to centuries of a system that decided her identity wasn't important.

My two inheritances don't fit together comfortably. They never have. Scottish settlers who helped build the very system that created centuries of Irish Catholic suffering. I am both sides of that coin. I hold a genuine conviction that their suffering matters and the history deserves to be told honestly, even if it implicates people who share my last name. I am the last Shaw in my line, and I plan to write the history honestly instead of looking away from the parts of it that are uncomfortable to claim.

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Places to look for your own family history and arrival to the US:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island 

https://www.nps.gov/elis/learn/education/finding-arrival-records-online.htm