The McAdoo Clan is made up of many families and many surnames. Our ancestral roots are comprised  of four basic family surnames — McAdoo, Smith, Peel, and Dripps. The family tree contains the  names of my direct ancestors and descendants and those of my wife, Virginia, as well  as the children of these direct relationships. The tree continues to grow as new names are  identified, and its roots now extend back to the eleventh century.

The roots of our McAdoo and Dripps ancestors are in County Donegal, and County Derry,  respectively, Ulster, Northern Ireland, while the origins of our Smith and Peel ancestors are in  Yorkshire, England.

The McAdoo family name is the anglicized form of the Gaelic Mac Conduibh, son of Cu Dhubh,  meaning "black hound." The original name is of Connacht and West Ulster. It is also anglicized as  Cunniff and McNiff. The McAdoo clan probably originated in the Galloway area of southwest  Scotland. McAdoos may have arrived in Ireland in the early seventeenth century during the  Plantation of Ulster. The Primary Valuation Property Survey of 1848-64 shows most of the McAdoos  resided in County Donegal followed by County Monaghan. The McAdoo clan in Ireland was never very  large and most families were Presbyterian.

The Smith family name is an English occupational name for a worker in metal, from Middle English  smith (Old English smið, probably a derivative of smitan ‘to strike, hammer’). Metal-working was  one of the earliest occupations for which specialist skills were required, and its importance  ensured that this term and its equivalents were perhaps the most widespread of all occupational  surnames in Europe. This is the most frequent of all British and American surnames.

The Peel family name is English (mainly northern) from Anglo-Norman French pel ‘stake’, ‘pole’  (Old French piel, from Latin palus), a nickname for a tall, thin man. It may also have been a  topographic name for someone who lived by a stake fence or in a property defended by one, or a  metonymic occupational name for a builder of such fences.

The Dripps family name is a Scottish habitational name from a place in Lanarkshire called Dripps. 

This site is dedicated to my father, James Joseph McAdoo. He was known to everyone as Jimmy, and  to some as Fa, Coach, and The Rev. The book, Jimmy: Swimmer, Coach, and Dad, published by  iUniverse, is the story of his life.