Guinness family


The Guinness family is an Anglo-Irish noble family known for its achievements in brewing, banking, politics, and Protestant ministry. The brewing branch is particularly well known among the general public for producing the dry stout beer Guinness, as founded by Arthur Guinness in 1759. An Anglo-Irish Protestant family, beginning in the late 18th century, they became a part of what is known in Ireland as the Protestant Ascendancy.
The "banking line" Guinnesses all descend from Arthur's brother Samuel who set up as a goldbeater in Dublin in 1750; his son Richard, a Dublin barrister; and Richard's son Robert Rundell Guinness who founded Guinness Mahon in 1836.
The current head of the family is the Earl of Iveagh. Another prominent branch, descended from the 1st Earl of Iveagh, is headed by Lord Moyne.

Origins

The Guinness family refers to the descendants of Richard Guinness of Celbridge, who married Elizabeth Read, the daughter of a farmer from Oughterard, County Kildare. Details of Richard's life and family background are scarce, with many legends and rumours, and as a result tracing ancestry beyond him has proven difficult. On the subject Lord Moyne, writing in The Times in 1959, wrote:
The traditional view is that the Guinnesses were descended from the Clan Magennis of Iveagh, prominent Irish-Gaelic nobility from County Down. The Magennis family were Catholic Jacobites who, led by Bryan Magennis, 5th Viscount Iveagh, fought at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Members of the arriviste Guinness family, wishing for more impressive origins, have long claimed Magennis ancestry. Sir Bernard Burke corroborated this descent in his various genealogical works. The Rev. Hosea Guinness was granted an altered version of their coat of arms; and Edward Cecil Guinness, head of the brewing line, chose for his title "Earl of Iveagh". A romantic and fanciful rumour existed that Richard Guinness was the illegitimate son of Viscount Magennis before he fled to the Continent.
However, in 2007 Patrick Guinness authored Arthur's Round: The Life and Times of Brewing Legend Arthur Guinness in which he largely disproves the apparent pretence of descent from Magennis of Iveagh. Instead, based on DNA testing conducted by Trinity College Dublin, Patrick Guinness asserts descent from the Macartans, a lesser County Down clan under the Magennises. He further demonstrates that the ancestors of the Guinness family were not descended from the Macartan chiefs but in fact mere followers and tenants. According to him, the name derives from the townland of Guiness which in 1640 is recorded as property of Phelim Macartan.
There exists also a lesser-known, but equally fanciful view that the Guinnesses were a branch of the family of Gennys of Tralee. The family were minor landed gentry of Cornish extraction, who came to Ireland from Cornwall during the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s. The origin of the name in this case would be from St Gennys, near Padstow, with Guinness representing a corruption of the original surname and family branch in Kildare/Dublin. Parallel and contrasting the Magennis theory, one rumour was that Richard Guinness was the illegitimate son of an English soldier stranded in Ireland after the Boyne, and an Irish girl. According to the same sort of rumours, Richard was a groom who eloped with Elizabeth Read.
Henry Seymour Guinness, of the banking line, who was also the first to suggest "Owen Guinnis" as the father of Richard, was the main proponent of Cornish origins. Patrick Guinness dismisses the Cornwall origin on the basis that Henry Guinness's great-uncle was an MP for Barnstaple and bankrupted, and therefore biased and unreliable. He does however concur with the theory that Owen Guinnis was the father of Richard.

Prominent members