FEAR ME, THE CHILD OF THE RAVEN
I'm still poking around in my spare 17 seconds a day in an interesting, if slow, effort to find my roots and discover my nineteenth cousins twice removed, who no doubt include Brad Pitt and Mario Lopez among their numbers, and then after a family reunion I will become BFF with Brad and Mario, and we will share many laughs and homoerotic moments, because even though we're related, we're not that related, and then Brad and Mario will break up with their women and we'll console each other one night and then everyone will have too much to drink and then...

...uh. Okay, anyway.

That's why I was just Googling great-great-grandfather Hugh Byrnes and stumbled across this:

Wickow became the mountainous refuge of the Byrnes clan (chidren of Bran or the Raven) which fought the English for about four hundred years and off, and held out for far longer than any other clan.

The Byrnes, as I have read, were the very last clan defeated and destroyed by the English.

The were closely aligned with the Tooles. The O'Byrne and O'Toole clans combined to fight the English (but maybe fought each other at other time as everyone seemed to not get on well together in the past). I think there was maybe some association with the Kelly clan to the west too, but I am not sure about that.

The O'Byrne and O'Toole clans were both declared to be "beyond the Pale" by the English, sort of like dangerous outlaws or barbarians in English eyes.

And in the eyes of the native Irish, the English had stolen their island of Eire. This is why there was warfare that lasted for many hundreds of years, only now hopefully coming to an end with England largely withdrawn again out of Ireland.

In other words, when I tell you I will kick you in the balls, it would be advisable to believe me. Beware the Byrneses. The Pitts and Lopezes, too.

On a semi-related note, most of my people came to New York State via Canada. In honor of them, I am going to take up hockey and mispronounce words, eh...