Behind the Name

In my recent post, Gender Issues, I discussed the problems I had in determining the gender of some of the persons in my tree. Jane, one of the people who commented on my post said "Have you come across http://www.behindthename.com it's very handy for those Irish names and the Roman Catholic Priest trick of using Latin versions of names on documents."

www.behindthename.com

I didn't know about that site, thanks, Jane and I guess that some of my readers may not either.

I discovered that Aoife is female: 
Means "beauty" from the Gaelic word aoibh. In Irish legend Aoife was a warrior princess. In war against her sister Scathach, she was defeated in single combat by the heroCúchulainn. Eventually she was reconciled with her sister and became the lover of Cúchulainn. This name is sometimes used as a Gaelic form of EVE or EVA. http://www.behindthename.com/name/aoife

The other two Irish names I was unsure of, Caoimhe and Eimear, were also female but Ezoma and Shearin were not in the list.

I'm off to my Family Historian database to do a bit of gender assignment.