Just wondering if there is a sizable amount of people with the surname Folan in Spain. It is quite popular in Galway county, Ireland, along with the story of the Black Irish. Perhaps it can shed some truth on the situation. Searches through the online White Pages didn't come up with too much.

Can you fill us in on the background of this story? Why might there be Spaniards with an Irish last name (or is it vice-versa)? What does "Black Irish" mean?

Here is the abstract of a 2000 NY Times article that might interest you:

Researchers Trace Roots of the Irish and Wind Up in Spain

By NICHOLAS WADE (NYT)

ABSTRACT - Researchers at Trinity College in Dublin use Irish surnames and DNA analysis to develop evidence that Irish men in Connaught, western province of Ireland, are almost all descended from population of hunters and gatherers who inhabited Ireland before invention of agriculture; first carriers of ancestral European DNA signature presumably were among earliest modern human occupants of continent after Neanderthals were driven out; outside of Ireland, signature is most common in Basque country of northern Spain, where 89 percent of men carry it; findings are reported in journal Nature (M)

March 23, 2000, Thursday

It doesn't seem a spanish surname... I've make a search in our white pages and the only Folan I found was irish.

Fernando

Supposedly, Spanish sailors from the 1588 Armada who crashed on the coast of Ireland and intermingled with the Irish population, introducing Mediterranean genes. That is the story of the 'black irish.' However, I'm not so sure if it is true or not.

That's a popular legend; but many of the shipwrecked Spanish sailors were killed by the Irish. One man in west County Clare claimed to have single-handedly killed more than 100 Spanish sailors, many of whom were ethnic Arab mercenaries from Morocco. The 'Black Irish' came many centuries earlier: Celtic tribes set out from northern Spain and Portugal and headed north to Ireland in about the 3rd Century, AD. I have done some research on this subject and concluded that they were driven out, either by an invading horde or (more likely) by a series of natural disasters. They headed north, 600 miles across the mar Cantabrico, leading me to believe that their problem was coming from the South. If you visit some Castreno or Celtic village sites in the north of Spain you may conclude, as I did, that they left in haste.

There was another Celtic migration around the 7th or 8th Century AD into the northern part of Ireland.

There's a place called Spanish Point in County Clare; there's an Armada Hotel there and a great 9-hole Links course.

There's a Spanish Arch in Galway and there was a Mayor of Galway named Lynch who sentenced his own son to be hanged for some indiscretion with a Spanish NobleWoman.

The earlier immigrants probably made landfall in Munster (Kerry, Cork, etc., although some may have made it to the north of the Shannon Estuary (Clare, Galway & Connemara, Mayo: the latter are in Connaught).

There's always the possibility that Fulano, loosely translated to 'what's his name?' became Folans