Life
1732-1809 [Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman]; b. Castletown, Co. Clare; ed. Irish College, Paris, MD; m. dg. of Count d’Eon, and inherited extensive vineyards which he lost in the revolution, whereat he retired to Ireland on the charity of his relations; he was created Chevalier in the Irish Brigade by Louis XV, a personal friend; native Irish-speaker; associated with Charles O’Conor from c.1764; collected Irish manuscripts and compiled pedigrees of expatriates, arranging for the Book of Lecan [recte Ballymote] to be given to the RIA by the Irish College, being the first MS in Irish to come to the RIA; he possessed a complete set of the Annals. DIB
Commentary
C. C. & R. E. Ward, eds., Letters of Charles O’Conor, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor Michigan: Irish American Cultural Inst./University Microfilms 1980): Charles O’Conor of Belanagare commends O’Gorman’s projected history of Co. Clare on ‘Smith’s plan’, viz., the author of histories of Down, Waterford, and Cork, and Kerry, later praised by T. B. Macauley, and supplies information from Leabhar Gabhála, and the Irish Annals, and recommends the Annals of the Four Masters as a source for the later period. (1 Sept. 1767; p.199f.; also further letters to, at p.399, 400, &c.); also, ‘I have known [him] for seventeen years’ ([1781]; here p.414.)
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